A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home
by o0-Key-0o
Summary: After the abrupt end to the Reaper threat, the Normandy's crew is a hundred days from home. With the help of Diana Allers' camera drone, they decide to record their thoughts and memories to help a recovering Commander Shepard through her own aftermath. What will the galaxy be like when the Normandy makes it back to the local cluster? Join them on the journey.
1. Prologue

_Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me). However, if I get antsy and create a language or alphabet, that does belong to me. (You unfortunate people that have read my other, incomplete fanfics know how that goes.)_

_Author's Note: My husband decided to tease me about Mass Effect by playing through the majority of it when I was at work, and he would tell me all the cool things that happened. Having never used a PS3 in my life (playing a DVD on it caused me grief), I decided to undertake the impossible. Left to my own devices, I played through the trilogy in less than three weeks. I have not had a geek obsession this encompassing since Lord of the Rings in 2002, and 'Trapped As A Mary Sue' is what resulted from that. You are also additionally warned that I don't always finish my fanfictions. Get attached at your own risk._

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Prologue_

The nameplate rested across the end of the bed in the captain's cabin. For the fifth time in as many minutes, Garrus Vakarian found he was staring at it. The overhead lights gleamed off of the smooth patina, blotting out the first few letters of 'Shepard'.

_Shepard. How's that bar looking up there?_ he thought, then immediately chastised himself. They couldn't be sure. He couldn't be sure she was really gone. Whatever Shepard had done, she had done for the greatest amount of people. Of course, Joker couldn't admit that right now. He had closeted himself in the AI core, and nobody save Liara had dared to disturb him. Liara only bothered him enough to make sure he was at least still eating something.

Tali was doing the same for him. She was the only other dextro on board the _Normandy_, and Garrus suspected that she and Liara had a secret pact to make sure everyone was going to get through the next few days while the upended galaxy sorted itself out.

He was staring at the nameplate again. Garrus shook himself and stood, wincing as the still-healing wounds on his right arm and leg twinged as if to remind him of his last moment with Shepard. Doc Chakwas had patched him up, but Garrus didn't even know that he cared enough right now to be grateful.

Tali's voice resonated in his skull. _"Shame on you, Garrus. The thanks is that Shepard wanted you alive—wanted us all alive. She loved you enough to send you back."_

She'd sent him back. Made him leave her. The logical part of his brain knew that he'd already lost too much blood to make it to the conduit when she'd hauled him to the _Normandy_. But the sorrow clouding his judgment meant that he could continue to blame himself for not arguing the point—that his presence would have made a difference in whatever had happened at the Crucible.

That at the very least, they could have walked into that bar in heaven arm-in-arm.

"Garrus?"

He turned, too mentally exhausted to be surprised that he hadn't heard the cabin door open. It was Vega, still with a bandage showing above the collar of his white shirt. He had taken a bad hit outside the conduit, too. They'd both been in no shape to do what Shepard had insisted she take on herself. Garrus hadn't seen James since the big marine had been released from the medical bay. The only reason Chakwas had kept Garrus longer was because he'd needed more blood transfused, and it took longer for a turian. Something about finding just the right soft spot between the exoskeletal plates.

James was looking past him to the nameplate on the bed. "You made the right call, Scars—not putting that up."

"Did I? What if it's false hope?" Garrus said, his subtones flat.

Instead of responding to the obvious barb, James gestured. "Come on. Traynor's called a meeting in the starboard observation lounge."

Garrus was unable to mentally process the request. He had hoped for an argument, a consolation—anything to tear his focus from the raw, aching feeling that was Shepard's absence. "A meeting? Why?"

"Cuz unlike some of you_ lolos_, she's been working her tail off to reestablish any kind of stable connection with the Alliance," James said, his eyebrows drawing together. He gestured again, impatiently. "She wouldn't say anything until everyone was there."

Garrus was suddenly acutely aware that his face hurt. He consciously unclenched his jaw and had to work his mandibles loose from their locked position. Then he had to remember to take a breath as the cabin hazed out of focus briefly.

"Woah, hey, Scars. We gonna have to go see the doc again?" James asked, his bantering tone emerging for just a second. "You okay?"

He steadied himself against the empty fish tank for a moment. "What…?"

But James was shaking his head. "Traynor wouldn't say anything," he repeated. "Kaidan threatened to fire her, and she_ still_ wouldn't budge. She's got some—"

But Garrus was already moving past him. If there was news to be had, he needed it. At this moment, he felt like he had never needed anything so badly before. James followed him, eyeing him up and down as if afraid the turian might still consider falling over.

The elevator's descent to the third deck seemed to crawl. The _Normandy_ was operating at seventy-five percent of optimum efficiency, and all of that efficiency had been EDI. Joker's landing on this unknown planet had been textbook, but once Donnelly and Daniels had confirmed that EDI's artificial body was no more than an empty shell and the AI core burnt out, he'd been uncommunicative. Garrus felt that somehow the pilot blamed _him_ for EDI's loss—because Shepard wasn't there for him to lash out at her.

_"Whatever choice she made, it was the __**wrong**__ one!"_ he'd heard Joker shout at Liara. _"She could have done __**something **__differently; there had to be another way!"_ It had taken time, but Liara hadn't given up. Her soothing, straightforward manner took all the fire out of Joker's anger, just as Tali's straighten-up-and-cheer-up attitude had lifted Garrus out of his darker moods.

The elevator doors opened and James led the way to the lounge. The door was propped open, likely because all of the_ Normandy's_ crew was attempting to squeeze itself into the small space. Tali was waiting for him outside. She straightened up when she saw him, and let out a little 'ahem!' that cleared an immediate path for Garrus and James.

Once they made their way through the crowd of standing servicemen and women, they could see that the other squad mates were assembled. Liara was standing at Traynor's shoulder in front of the large window, and Kaidan was pacing in a little circle off to one side, shooting Traynor aggrieved looks. Javik was also standing, but in opposition to Kaidan's jittery movements, the Prothean was remarkably still and calm. Near Javik, the reporter Diana Allers was poised with her camera drone, ready to capture everything. She'd had no contact with her news network since the abrupt end of hostilities, but that wasn't going to stop her from recording everything as it happened. The _Normandy_ had been the front line of the Reaper war, and even if the story was late, people across the galaxy still cared about her crew and the efforts they'd made. That was what Tali had told him, anyway.

Tali ushered Garrus to an empty seat and pressed him down onto it. Liara glanced up from the datapad she was reading and offered him a small smile. It didn't tell him anything.

Little conversations had sprung up among the crew, but Garrus didn't want to hear them. There could be no more speculating on his part—he had already imagined the worst for himself. He had once told Shepard that he wanted one thing to go right…and now this.

The quiet talking in the room abruptly stilled as Joker limped through the crowd of people. He looked terrible; red-rimmed eyes, his beard even scruffier than usual. His gaze locked on Garrus, and his eyes narrowed significantly. The turian knew that Joker was less than pleased to see him. But then the pilot's gaze turned aside, and he sat gingerly on a seat suddenly vacated by Engineer Adams.

"All right, that's everyone," Liara said, glancing around. A few nodded to confirm, and Diana started up her camera drone. Traynor squinted a little into its light, but she straightened up and began.

"As you all know, all communications buoys within a significant radius of the mass relays have all suffered damage. We landed in a dark spot and have been patching these buoys as we make our way back into the edge of the Far Rim."

That was where Joker had jumped to, as fast as he could get the _Normandy_ to cooperate. He'd tried to outrun the Crucible's energy field as it had passed through the relay system…but it hadn't been enough. The lights had gone out throughout the ship, the engine had hiccuped as Joker was on a final approach to the unknown, agrarian planet…and EDI was silent. There had been a tense moment when Garrus felt the cybernetics in his face and torso seize up…

_No._ He pushed the thought aside. He didn't know how much of Shepard's body was controlled by synthetic devices; the logs they had found in the Illusive Man's base were non-specific, and he'd never talked with Miranda Lawson or Jacob Taylor to know the details of Project Lazarus. All he'd ever cared about was that she was back. The commander—_his_ commander—was alive. He'd followed her once and she'd never led him astray. Garrus could have followed her anywhere; she'd been his purpose ever since she'd shown up on the Citadel, fear in her eyes at what she'd seen on Eden Prime, but still possessing the overpowering determination to do what she had to. She'd found Saren, faced Harbinger, done a hundred impossible things—that was why he loved her. Choosing him over any of the other men that had expressed an interest in her was just one more impossible thing. And he'd used to say to her, _"You do three impossible things before breakfast each day."_

Traynor was still talking, mapping a course that would take them back to the local cluster—back to the Earth that had been ground zero. It wasn't Shepard's home, he knew that…but it was her home in loyalty alone; the place where humanity had had its start. Though she'd never lived there, she had fought to keep it; fought for a future he didn't know she could ever see.

"It should take approximately a hundred days to get back Earth," Traynor was saying when Garrus managed to pull himself out his dark self-reflection. "The Pylos Nebula relay is expecting us to help as much as possible with the work; when that's completed we'll have a straight jump to Phoenix Massing, which should be back online when we get there. The Caleston Rift relay is the true problem; the overlapping shock waves from all the clustered nearby relays did a lot of damage. Once we're there, we're going to coordinate with supply ships and again, help in any way we can to repair the relay." The communications officer glanced over at Liara.

Liara pulled her datapad out from where she'd tucked it under her arm. "With the last comm buoy going active, we were finally able to tap into the Alliance's network again. Reports from Earth are still coming in, but there are tentative casualty lists. In addition, I have been able to get other reports through my own network. Lists from Palaven, Thessia, Tuchanka, and many other planets are available."

The room was still, waiting for Liara to continue. Kaidan had frozen in his frenetic pacing and his dark eyes were locked on the asari.

In a steady voice, Liara went on, "Commander Shepard's name is not on any of the lists." Garrus tensed, and Tali put a steadying hand on his arm. "And that…is…because her name appears on the intensive care unit list of the medical ship _Zuckerkandl_."

The last sentence was like a bombshell; the reaction of the crew spread in a growing wave. There were laughs, there were cheers, and Garrus wasn't sure what to do; he wasn't even sure he'd heard correctly, but Liara stilled everyone with a wave of her arm.

"Commander Shepard needs our help. The synthetic and cybernetic implants Cerberus used are intact, and the best surgeons on the ship are working daily to keep her alive…but they're losing. Doctor Chakwas is the one that suggested we could help."

The platinum-haired doctor stepped forward, out of the crowd. "It worked for Shepard before, and I believe it will work again. She needs our memories of the best times, the most inspirational thoughts. It is no great sacrifice to us to let Diana record these moments and send them to Shepard. I propose that each day until we get back to Earth, we send something to her. We can record in groups, or alone."

"Diana has graciously allowed us the use of her drone," Liara said. "It can edit and transmit for you, and will be here in this lounge for use."

"If it's not, you know where to find me," Diana spoke up, her round face uncharacteristically somber. Then, a small half-smile appeared on her face. "Just remember that the drone keeps a log, so no funny business."

Kaidan stepped forward as little conversations began to spring up again. "As acting CO, I know I can speak for a lot of us in saying that we can do this. The commander brought us through a lot—all of us. She's done shopping trip runs, listened to us fight, tell jokes, even walked in on a food fight and laughed it off—all because we were her crew."

"We _are_ her crew," James corrected. "Lola wouldn't leave us hanging, ever." He glanced around, and his fellow crewmen nodded. "And that food fight was Donnelly's fault."

"That's what we need," Chakwas said with a smile. "And, I daresay, it will help morale around here, too."

"We should be at the Far Rim's relay by tomorrow," Traynor said. "Its repairs are going well; we may be able to use it in a few days. Until then, we'll be helping ferry supplies in the system." She glanced at Liara, and then at Kaidan. "That's all I have, Major Alenko."

Kaidan jerked his head in a single nod. "Dismissed, everyone."

The crewmen slowly began to disperse and a few of them went to talk with Allers, but Engineer Adams, trailed closely by Donnelly and Daniels, approached Joker. The pilot was sitting very still, his eyes focused somewhere out the window behind Traynor and Liara. "Flight Lieutenant...we have an idea for you. When we got contact back with the Alliance, we asked them for the hardcopy data from the Luna base, of the Titan VI. We think that maybe...we could...well, recreate EDI manually."

For a long moment, Joker continued to look out the window as if he hadn't heard anything. Adams shifted from foot to foot and Daniels traded an uneasy look with Donnelly. Then, abruptly, the pilot stood up. He fixed the three engineers with an unreadable look, and nodded to them. "I have a ship to fly," he said, adjusting his cap with deft hands. "And I have a lot of duty shifts to catch up on. We'll...talk later." And with that, Joker marched out of the observation lounge with as much determination as his condition would allow.

Garrus suddenly realized he was now the center of attention. For his part, he felt as if he were numb. A thousand images washed over his mind's eye, and he looked up at Liara as if for a cue. What should he feel? He couldn't think straight. _ The one good thing that's happened to me..._

Thankfully, Tali shifted the group's attention. "That can't be everything, Liara," she said pointedly. "Did the doctors contact Miranda? She knows everything about Project Lazarus, she could help."

"Until they fix the Exodus Cluster relay, Miranda's only available for consult over video calls," Liara replied. "But she's doing everything she can. Also, the Cerberus facility with all of the powerful, expensive equipment used was destroyed. The medical ship is the best they could do. With all the other rebuilding, resources are short."

"But they're gonna do whatever it takes, right?" James asked. "They wouldn't bail on the commander now."

Liara sighed and looked down at the floor before shaking her head. "Admiral Hackett assured me that Shepard's in the best hands possible. I'm still working on getting the full report about what happened. I've seen pictures of the Citadel, or what's left of it, but as I understand it, Shepard was found in London."

"But we know she got up to the Citadel; how'd she get back down?" Kaidan asked in surprise.

"It's Shepard," Garrus found himself saying. He stood up and fixed Kaidan with a fierce look. "She does three impossible things before breakfast." He took a deep breath, and for the first time in several days, it didn't hurt. "Thanks, Liara." Tali poked him. "And Tali."

James coughed. Garrus smirked a little bit at him. "All right, I get the point, Vega. I'm sorry."

"All this snivelling for a primitive," Javik said disdainfully, shaking his head.

Liara sounded startled. "But you always said Shepard was an avatar of this time...oh. You were joking."

The Prothean gave the asari what passed for a smile. "The commander_ is_ an avatar. She is our victory."

"Come on," Kaidan said, waving Diana over. "What do you say we start the next hundred days with a message from us?"

The teammates looked around, and heads nodded. "Yes." "You got it." "Absolutely."


	2. Day One

_Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me). _

_Author's Note: Apologies. Document formatting on this website has changed, and thus removed my attempts to section off the end. I hope (fifth time trying) that it's fixed now._

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Day One_

"Javik, you're bulky. Stand on the end."

"Tali, nobody can see you in the back."

"What's to see? I'm wearing a full body suit!"

With some maneuvering, elbowing, and a couple choice phrases, Shepard's former squad organized themselves into two rows. Tali and Liara were in the front, and staggered behind them were Javik, Kaidan, James, and finally, Garrus.

"Okay," Allers said, making some adjustments to the drone control on her omnitool. "We'll do this in one take. Who's starting off?"

The squad exchanged glances. "I don't know that we thought that far ahead," Liara said after a moment. "I could begin, I suppose, and we will move in order from there. Garrus, do you mind closing it?"

"I'll try to restrict my comments for the sake of the general audience," the turian said dryly. "But I reserve the right to send appropriate boyfriend messages in private."

"Noted," Diana said, a devious half-smile pulling at her lips. James chuckled and nudged Tali. Kaiden muttered something under his breath, and Liara rolled her eyes at their childishness. Javik just maintained his eyes-straight-ahead posture, as if he wasn't in the same room with the rest of them.

"All right, recording in three, two...one." Diana cued Liara as the camera drone adjusted itself to better view the asari's face.

Smoothly, as if she had rehearsed the entire thing, Liara began. "Shepard, you can't imagine how relieved we are that you'll be waiting for us when we get back. I know it will be a longer time than any of us want, but I promise that we'll be in touch with you every day; every chance we have."

"You did what you had to do, and for all of us, I say thank you," Tali said sincerely. "And, if you can keep a secret, I'll teach you how to cook dextro." She shot a look up and over her shoulder at Garrus. "After all, we wouldn't want a repeat of my birthday from 2183." There were a few stifled snorts.

"Commander, I am pleased to report that the writing of the book with Dr. T'Soni goes well," Javik said. "But I have had to promise that I cannot call every race primitive, as it makes for confusing reading to call everyone 'primitives'. Also, I have discussed the best way to serve salarian liver with your former comrade Wrex. If you seek recipes, perhaps you would like that one."

"He's joking, Commander," Kaidan said quickly. Javik fixed him with a look, then slowly nodded to show it was true. "I don't know how you managed to keep us all in line," the major went on, blinking into the camera's light. "You did all the hard work for me, I guess. Don't worry, Shepard, I'll bring the _Normandy_ back to you in one piece. You've got my word."

"Hey Lola, so have I got a story for you," James said as the drone drifted a little left to catch him in its pickup. "It's the one about that food fight you walked into. And I'll have to tell it without Donnelly here to mess it up. So you gotta hang in there, or you won't get the real deal, _comprendes?_"

Garrus blinked as the camera moved on to him. "Shepard, I..." He had to pause; his mandibles worked for a moment. "I know what we said about the bar, but I was wrong. After this war, it's got to be crowded up there, and I know how impatient you are. So the next time I see you, I'll have the drinks with me." He tried to imagine her face from their last date, red with embarrassment as he'd dragged her out onto that dance floor. Garrus forced down the quaver that threatened to undermine his calm subvocals. "I promised these guys I wouldn't be...what's the word?"

"Sappy?"

"Disgusting."

"Romantic!"

"Tali, you're not helping."

"You had your turns," Garrus said with a sideways glare at the rest of the squad. "I promise to talk to you soon. I love you, starshine." He'd only ever called her that once before, but if Shepard was conscious enough to understand, then maybe the nickname would bring back that memory.

"And we're clear," Diana said as the camera drone dutifully zipped back over to her. "I'm thinking of making a sign-up roster for use of the drone. I have some footage I want to cut together from the _Normandy's_ involvement in the London battle, but I promise to tightbeam this to the buoy first."

"Diana, thank you," Liara said, but the ANN reporter shook her head.

"I owe Commander Shepard just as much as you. I'll be taking my turn, too. But this is a good start-I can tell the crew will rally for this." She winked at them and turned away to address Traynor, who had been speaking with a couple of other crewmen.

Now that the initial revelation had had a moment to dawn on everyone, the six remaining squad mates looked between themselves. Liara was smiling, a small, hopeful smile that was echoed as Tali gave the asari a hug. It was then that Garrus saw the tears in the Shadow Broker's eyes-they shone for a moment before Liara wiped them away.

James crossed his thick arms. "Gah, you guys are killing me with all the feels. I've got things to do...somewhere. I'm sure there's _something_ still left to clean up." He shook his head at the two women and left the lounge.

"He's just jealous you didn't hug him, too, Tali," Garrus said lightly. He felt different; strangely unburdened-even giddy-now that he knew for sure there was a chance. Even a small breath of hope was enough to focus his mindset. There would be time to reflect later, but now he had a duty. There could be no more listlessness; he needed to know what had happened to Primarch Victus and the rest of the forces stationed on Earth. They would need to begin coordinating extraction of survivors, rationing of supplies, and take stock of what relays were working between star clusters.

"It was strange, being in limbo," Kaidan said. "For so long we didn't know anything, and now...now I can check up on my students, find out about my family."

"It was almost a relief to know that we _couldn't_ know," Liara agreed. "Now we have actions to take, and truth to face about what happened."

"The Shadow Broker didn't want information?" Kaidan asked, raising an eyebrow.

"It's not like that, Kaidan. It's just something Shepard taught me, after having spent so much time on ships her entire life: being in between something was what felt safest. In between planets, in between assignments-those were the moments she told me to look for."

Garrus remembered Shepard telling him the same thing, the two of them sitting up late one night aboard the _Belinda_ after the incident on Amaterasu. That was when he'd first called her 'starshine'-in jest then, more out of relief that she and Liara were safe than any attachment. Strange, he hadn't thought about that since...before. Before Shepard had died.

_No._ Garrus had just received the hope that there wouldn't be a second time, that he would be spared the descent into darkness again. There wouldn't be another Omega; it had almost killed him. He had tried to recreate the feeling Shepard had given him by putting together his own team, trying to make a difference the only way he knew how: dispensing justice against all of the merc gangs that infested Omega. It had ended...poorly.

Garrus had never told Shepard what he'd seen when he looked through his scope, down onto that bridge at the new wave of 'mercs'. After being entrenched in his position for days, he'd thought he was hallucinating-he _had_ been hallucinating.

_I __**will**__ tell her,_ he abruptly decided. No use in dwelling on it now when he was still coming to grips with the overwhelming sensation of time moving forward, no longer trapping him with his dark thoughts.

He had to focus before his mind went everywhere at once; Garrus turned on his omnitool to make a note to share that memory with Shepard. Before he could, however, golden scrolling text filled his view. With Traynor's efforts at getting them back up on the extranet, his data systems were strained to the limit with all the unread reports, messages, and intel he needed to handle.

Garrus squared his shoulders. It was time to tackle the galaxy again, but not as the sniper who had had his teammates' backs. He was the primarch's military consultant, and he had his people to care for. He could use the terminal in the main battery to route his messages and track the remainder of the Hierarchy's forces as the turians struggled to regroup.

"Major Alenko, Admiral Hackett is on vid comm for you," Traynor said from across the room.

Kaidan nodded. "It's time to find out what the Alliance needs us to do." Garrus and Javik fell into an unconscious formation behind the acting CO as they left the observation lounge.

"I do not know what a military does in times of peace," Javik said. "I never had peace in my cycle."

"This isn't peace yet, Javik," Garrus said. "Whatever alliances were made for this war, you can bet the balance will shift eventually. And those that operate outside the law will be quick to take advantage of what they can."

"The _Normandy's_ not a big ship; she's a precision instrument," Kaidan said. "I predict the Alliance has us mopping up little problems all the way back to Earth."

"Ah, for the days of 2185," Garrus said, his subtones vibrating wryly. "When it was 'go here and save these scientists' or 'investigate that eerie, derelict ship'. Milk runs compared to brokering peace between the turians and krogan."

Kaidan was silent, and Garrus belatedly remembered his reaction to Shepard on Horizon around that same time. But then the human biotic appeared to shake it off. "That was Shepard through and through-leave no speck of space dust unturned."

Garrus parted ways with Javik and Kaidan at the mess hall, where he passed the kitchen; the scene of many an interesting experiment. And that wasn't Shepard's fault, really. She knew when she was beaten in regards to cooking from anything except a ration pack. No, it had been Tali's unfamiliarity with human-style appliances. There hadn't ever been a fire, but...well, did sparks count?

It was both enlightening and bittersweet to walk through the ship in the mindset of all the things that had happened here. Everything from birthdays, to Christmas, to that food fight Donnelly had apparently started but wasn't allowed to tell his side of the story. Not more than a month ago, he had stood right at the base of the stairs to the main battery and tried to top Vega's whoppers, king of all storytelling. They had declared it an amicable draw in the end, while Shepard stood by and watched, one hand over her mouth to cover her smile. What would she have said, if she'd joined in? Probably nothing, just as she had done. She was never a boaster, unless it had to do with how obedient her combat drone was. And even then, 'Charlie' was usually just a diversion. Something to do when there was absolutely nothing else. Garrus was very familiar with that; he had his own 'calibrations' to keep him occupied.

He hesitated on the top step and took a deep breath. It was a choice now. The memories wouldn't rule him; he would own them, save them, tell them to the camera drone and know that somewhere tens of days away, someone he loved would hear them.

The sensor outside the main battery sensed his presence as he took the step forward, and the doors whisked open for him. Garrus faced the familiar control panel. _Time to leave the darkness._

_. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. ._

"Incoming tightbeam transmission using Alliance priority codes," the communications officer spoke up. "It's from the _Normandy_."

"Contents?" the_ Zuckerkandl's_ duty officer asked.

"Looks like some personal video logs, addressed to Commander Shepard. Just two, sir."

"Transfer them to the admiral."

"Yes, sir."

_. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. .__. ._

Rear Admiral Hannah Shepard had a very limited view of construction. She had been at the Crucible's birthplace, and had watched the alien device come together as she labored to keep patrol rotations going, supply ships informed, and status reports broadcasting on all the appropriate encrypted channels.

In exchange, she now was watching the reconstruction of her daughter. She hadn't known the intended use of the Crucible; no one had. She had seen all the same news reports as everyone else: her daughter had activated it, and the Reapers were dead. Whatever her daughter had seen or done, the result was the success all the united worlds had hoped for, but it had come with a price.

And Hannah Shepard wasn't so sure that it hadn't been too high. She had lost her baby once before; had mourned her as she had mourned her husband years ago. She didn't know if she could do that again. She was watching her child fight a losing battle to stay alive; the trauma to her body had been so severe that it had been her synthetic implants keeping her alive when the rescue teams had located her broken form amidst the rubble outside the London conduit. The very same cybernetics, however, were interfering with the necessity of keeping Shepard sedated. Nothing worked for very long, and it had been Miranda Lawson's decision that the synthetic devices needed to be replaced.

Now, her body was so swathed in bandages that the younger Shepard was unrecognizable. Every day held a new surgery, changing out the most damaged cybernetics with the meagre supplies the trapped fleet had while they waited for the Charon Relay to finish repairs.

"Admiral, forwarded transmission for you," a calm voice informed her from the private terminal in the medical suite, interrupting her bleak thoughts.

Automatically, she flicked on her omnitool. Although on emergency leave to be with her daughter, she was still answering messages and coordinating some of the relief efforts for the southern hemisphere. She pulled up the first file; it was only a few minutes long.

An asari's face looked expectantly back at her, and beside her was a quarian. Behind them she could just make out two Alliance uniforms, and...that was that Prothean she'd seen pictures of. _"Shepard, you can't imagine how relieved we are-"_

Hannah paused the video. She knew these people, if only by reputation. Her daughter had never been consistent with telling her specific details about her missions, but the admiral knew enough. She resumed playing the video, matching names with faces as each one took their turn in the camera's spotlight. It was the hollow-looking turian at the end who gave her pause. His eyes shone brightly as he looked up into the camera.

_"I promise to talk to you soon. I love you, starshine."_

And for the first time in a week, a by-now unfamiliar expression pulled at Hannah Shepard's mouth. A smile._ Of course. A Shepard's place is in the stars._

She stood, and found her left leg was asleep from sitting so long, watching and waiting. Three limping steps took her to the far wall, where she disengaged the windows. The velvety black of the starscape, sprinkled with twinkling stars slowly phased into view. And then Hannah Shepard frowned. She went to the intercom. "The rear admiral would like to speak with the captain of the ship to port," she said crisply.

There was a brief, almost befuddled pause as the comm officer scrambled to find the requested information. "Uh, that's the_ Glorious Pyjak,_ ma'am. Krogan ship," he added somewhat unnecessarily as the admiral was familiar with the design.

"Thank you. Patch me through."

A moment later, she found herself speaking to a hard-shelled krogan with gleaming eyes. "Yes?" he asked gruffly.

"Captain, I am Admiral Hannah Shepard, and I have an unusual request-"

The krogan cut her off. "Shepard? The clan leader's bond-sister?"

Was that what her daughter had been doing on Tuchanka? "I...I'm Commander Shepard's mother."

"Hnh. What's your request, Admiral?" The krogan captain gestured to someone off to his left.

And now it sounded rather silly, now that she thought about it. "Could you perhaps move your ship off from the _Zuckerkandl?_ Just clear of the fore port section. As a...favor to me."

The krogan blinked slowly at her. "No problem, Admiral. We'll be out of the way in a few minutes. Urdnot Wrex would like to speak with you." He signaled the person on his left again, and Hannah Shepard found herself matching stares with a battle-scarred krogan she'd only ever heard about in reports.

"Admiral Shepard." Wrex fixed her with an appraising look. "I heard what the news had to say. What's the truth?" His red eyes were intent.

Hannah hesitated. Her daughter had at some point undoubtedly trusted this being with her life, and she was not in the habit of making poor decisions. "From what I'm told by the head of Project Lazarus, it's grim. She's fighting back, at least, I hope she is...but the damage is bad." She cleared her throat and tried to keep her voice level.

Wrex grunted, but Hannah knew enough about krogan expressions to see it was a blow to him. "I heard what the _Normandy's_ doing," he said. "I've got some people around here who'd like to help. And since I'll be stuck around here...I'll deliver my messages in person."

Hannah Shepard's eyebrows went up. "I'm afraid I don't understand, Urdnot Wrex. But...I know what your friendship means to my daughter. Please come as often as you like."

"Just Wrex, Admiral. I think Chakwas explained in a message. We'll speak again." And Wrex cut the call off.

The second video. Hannah queued it up and was greeted to a familiar sight: Karin Chakwas.

_"Hello, Hannah. I assume you will be viewing these entries with Commander Shepard. This entire thing was my idea, but I've been a champion of positive thought for far too long to think that it won't work again. We're proposing to send memories, notes, whatever we can think of to the commander while she's recovering. As you probably know by now, we'll be at least three months in our journey back here...and many of us wish we could be there in person to help you through this._

_"So, to lift both of your spirits, here's a memory Shepard knows well. This is one of many recordings Mordin Solus made for the commander. This one shows the most playback, so it was probably her favorite. All my love and prayers, Hannah. Chakwas out."_

The message picked up with the image of a older salarian, his large eyes quirked up at the corners in merriment. Hannah Shepard paused the playback and went to her daughter's side; as close as she could get with the sterile curtaining between them.

"Baby, I know...I've told you that I don't want to say goodbye again. It seems like that's all I say." Hannah thought she had cried herself out by now, but a couple of tears found their way down her face. "There are some other...family...members that want to talk to you." And she began to play Mordin's song.

_"I am the very model of a scientist salarian..."_


	3. Day Two

Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me).

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Day Two_

James Vega woke up when his head collided with the floor. He froze completely for a moment, waiting for the last vestiges of his recurring nightmare to vanish. He'd fallen completely out of his bunk, and managed to drag most of his bedding with him.

Once he was sure that he was himself, and that he'd woken no one else, the big marine got back up. His neck ached something fierce, but Chakwas had promised him it was just the final stages of the skin weave doing its job. His ribs were still sore, but at least he hadn't landed on them too heavily.

He sat back down on the edge of his bunk for a moment in the dark crew quarters, trying to calm his heartbeat. He_ hated_ that dream, but it seemed to be the only one that came around lately. It didn't help him with his sense of guilt, either. That was probably where the entire matter stemmed from, in actuality. Guilt over losing Shepard.

_"She wouldn't want you to live this way, Vega,"_ Esteban's voice said to him. James missed Cortez as if he'd lost a brother, and it hurt to go down to the shuttle bay when he knew he'd never again see his friend standing at the requisitions terminal or tinkering with the Kodiak.

With a quiet sigh, James grabbed a fresh shirt and carefully worked it on over his sore torso. He wasn't going to get any more sleep if he kept thinking this way. Better to get up and do something else. Maybe he'd get a drink from the lounge and then go work on...tuning something up. He'd bet his credit chip that Garrus was recalibrating something if he were to go look.

He slipped out of the crew quarters and headed for the port observation lounge, shaking off the skin-crawling sense his nightmare had given him. James wasn't one to let dreams get to him, but the lack of sleep was eventually going to run him down. He shook his head as the doors opened for him, and then immediately paused when he heard someone talking.

In the corner, Tali was curled up on one of the couches, speaking to the camera drone in her lilting, filtered voice. She didn't appear disturbed that James had interrupted her, so he ignored her and went over to the small bar, searching for something stiff, but not too strong. Kaidan had warned them all that it would be all hands on deck once they reached the Far Rim relay at approximately twelve hundred hours, and James was honestly looking forward to a little grunt work to take his mind off of things.

James settled onto a seat, trying to appear as if he weren't intruding as Tali recorded her message. From what he immediately gathered, Shepard had attempted to celebrate the quarian's birthday the first year Tali had been a member of the crew-when she was fresh on her pilgrimage. He listened as Tali unfolded the story.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Tali really hadn't been thinking much about what day it was-it was always odd the way the humans kept track of time. There were two separate clocks to consider, an adjusted calendar...it was a wonder anybody who didn't constantly check their omnitool could keep anything straight. Anyway, she'd been working on something for the_ Normandy's_ engines, under the careful supervision of Chief Engineer Adams (she couldn't exactly recall what at the moment).

Kaidan had come into the room. "Uh, Tali? I need you to come with me for a few minutes." His dark eyes had been shifty and although Tali wasn't very good at reading human expression yet, she could at least tell he was nervous.

"Can it wait?" she asked him a little plaintively. "My diagnostic is just about to finish for some of the tweaks I made to the drive core..."

He'd scratched the back of his head and looked off to the side for a moment. "Not really. Commander Shepard sent me...oh, I wasn't supposed to..."

Now Tali was openly suspicious. "Why wouldn't you tell me the commander wanted to see me?"

Kaidan sighed, and the way his mouth pulled down into a frown made it clear he was irritated. "I don't know, I'm just following orders. I'm not...very good at this." So he was irritated at himself, Tali surmised.

She decided to...how did humans say it? 'Give him a break.' Although not in the 'it needed to be fixed afterward' sense of the word 'break'. She had been very awkward back then, trying to fit in with a primarily human crew and not make an idiot out of herself. She had always felt as if she were all thumbs, but the more time she spent around the engineers, the more Tali knew that she had a unique opportunity to help. Her engineering background was just something all quarians had, out of the sheer need to maintain the Migrant Fleet. She saw the world differently, and Commander Shepard knew that. It meant a lot to Tali that Shepard valued her input.

"All right," she said. "Where are we going?"

"Just follow me," Kaidan said, straightening with relief. He guided her to the elevator and then to the port observation lounge. The instant the doors parted, a happy little chorus rang out:

_"Happy Birthday Tali!"_

Tali stopped dead in the doorway, looking around in sheer surprise. Her squadmates were collected in the room, all holding glasses and raising them in an honorific gesture. When it was clear that the quarian didn't know quite what to do with herself, Shepard stepped forward.

"I don't know how quarians mark the day they were born each year," the commander admitted, "but in the human culture, we have a little bit of a party with drinks, cake, and presents."

Tali's voice was awed. "But...how did you know?"

"I have my ways," Shepard said with a smile, putting a hand on Tali's arm and gently steering her into the room. "And I hope Kaidan didn't say anything too alarming to get you to come here."

"He's not very good with surprises," Tali replied honestly, and the commander snickered.

Now that Tali was in the center of the room, she could see that someone had draped paper ribbons over the backs of the benches, and some manner of colored, glowing bubbles or bags were attached to the ceiling in various places.

"I believe they're called 'balloons'," Liara said when she saw Tali gazing around in wonder. "A customary human decoration."

"Really hard to blow up when you have plates for a mouth," Garrus said wryly from where he was seated to the left. He raised his glass to Tali. "Courtesy of my recommendation, there are dextro-friendly drinks."

"I don't know what to say," Tali said slowly. "I wish I could express how unexpectedly wonderful this is."

"You just did," Garrus said, his mandibles twitching as he smiled. "And I hear Shepard went all out and made the cake for you."

"Cake for me? Does she even know how to make sure it's safe to eat?" Tali queried.

Garrus leaned forward as if imparting a secret. "I think the better question is: have you seen Shepard try to cook?"

"I have," Joker said from where he was sitting beside the turian with a glass of his own. "But I'll spare you the horror story of how they had to nearly vent the atmo on the last ship to put out the fire."

"But..." Tali protested slightly as she found a seat. "Surely operating human machinery should be easy for her. I mean, I would understand if she set an asari kitchen on fire..."

Liara handed Tali a tall glass, complete with straw. "I believe even Commander Shepard would find it difficult to do that, as asari no longer use open flames for food preparation."

The conversation was abruptly cut short when Shepard herself joined them, settling on the bench beside Tali. Her open, friendly gaze gave no indication she had heard any of the previous topic. Tali cleared her throat a little conspicuously and asked, "So, Shepard...what do humans do at birthday parties?"

"You mean when we're kids or when we're old enough to have alcohol?" Shepard asked with a grin. She shrugged. "I suppose it depends on how you were raised. I bet all of our human traditional birthdays are very different from one another."

"You mean you never played 'pin the horns on the salarian'?" Kaidan asked. "You missed out."

"Well, that sounds a lot harder than 'pin the tentacles on the hanar'," Ashley said. "But that way, everybody got a prize at the end, which is important when you have as many competitive little sisters as I do."

"What do you do to krogan?" Wrex asked in his rumbling voice from his seat near the windows. "Put their shells on?"

"Um...I think the only version I've heard of is 'pin the tail on the krogan'," Kaidan confessed after a moment. Ashley smothered a laugh behind one hand. "There aren't any asari, quarian, or turian themes in the human games that I know of," he hastily assured the other squadmates.

"Unless you count pinatas," Shepard said in a low tone that Tali was sure was meant to be overheard.

"'Pinatas'?" Garrus repeated.

Kaidan's face turned red. "Not my field of expertise; the Alenkos didn't play games that involved hitting things with a stick. It was far more common to get butter on your nose."

"Hitting-" Liara began.

"...with a _stick?!"_ Tali sat bolt upright and looked around. "You mean you-" But then she realized that Ashley was doubled over with laughter, and Shepard's shoulders were shaking in silent mirth, even though she covered her expression with her hand. Joker was chuckling hard enough that he nearly choked on his drink. Garrus at least had the sense not to slap him on the back.

"No, no!" Kaidan said hastily. "Pinatas are made from cardboard and paper, usually stuffed with candy or something. I've only seen ones that look like animals." He glared across the room at Shepard, who had the temerity to wink at him. "Ah, I hate my life," he muttered, and slunk over to the bar to refill his glass.

"Needless to say," Shepard spoke up once she had wiped tears out of her eyes, "those are all games we play as children. As adults, we mostly sit around and talk, eat dessert, and give you presents." She gestured to a side table that Tali hadn't noticed before; it had an assorted collection of packages and containers on it. A few were wrapped in some manner of cheerful, bright paper (Tali guessed those were from the humans), one was covered in what looked like random sheets of paper, and the others were simply in unmarked boxes (although one had some kind of shiny, decorative sticker on top).

The door to the lounge opened suddenly, and Dr. Chakwas came through. "Apologies for my tardiness," she said by way of greeting. "I was finishing a long distance consult." She held up a medium-sized package of her own, this one covered in purple paper with a matching mass of curled ribbon on the top. Wrex and Kaidan pointed to the pile of gifts and she walked over to add hers.

"So how does your family celebrate birthdays, Doc?" Joker asked. "Tali here was just asking about human traditions, and we've covered kids' games so far."

"Hm," Chakwas said, nodding to Kaidan who handed her a drink. She sat down beside Liara as she thought about it. "I suppose one of the ones most memorable from my childhood was when my family lived in Switzerland. There's an ancient tradition of hiring an evil clown to torment the birthday boy or girl all day long, ending when the clown throws a pie in your face." The doctor smiled a little mischievously.

"What?" Joker prodded.

"Oh, well, it was amusing...it never happened to me, but to one of the school friends I'd made. I'd been with her all day, and when the time came to throw the pie, I stepped in front of her."

"Took one for the team?" Ashley asked with a laugh.

"Oh no. I caught the pie-I've always had quick hands-and I threw it back at him. He wasn't so lucky. And then Shannon and I ran for it, all the way to my house where we hid under my bed until it was time for her own party." Chakwas smiled at the memory.

"You humans are strange," Wrex finally pronounced, sounding mystified. "Krogan just like a good feast, maybe some brawling in between. Get the blood pumping."

"Since asari are so long-lived," Liara said, "we only tend to celebrate every few years after a certain age. I believe the last time I celebrated my birthday was when I turned one hundred."

The humans all stared at the resident Prothean expert. "I'm...I forgot about that," Shepard admitted after a moment. "You wear your age well." She lifted her glass suddenly. "To birthdays, no matter when!"

"Birthdays!"

"Natal felicitations!"

"Really, is that what turians say?"

Once she'd set her glass down, Shepard turned to Tali. "Well, you're the birthday girl. Presents or cake first?"

"I get to choose?" Tali asked. When the commander nodded, the quarian straightened enthusiastically. "Presents, of course!"

Joker and Ashley both let out whoops of victory and held out their hands to Kaidan. He rolled his eyes and passed them something that looked suspiciously like credits.

"Do you mind?" Shepard asked them, but easy expression on her face told Tali that she was enjoying herself too much to be taken seriously. "You've got it, Tali." She jumped up and began ferrying the armload of gifts to her abandoned seat.

"Can I go first?" Joker asked with a grin. "Tali, you know you wanna open mine first."

"Well...which one is it?" the quarian asked, inspecting all the packages. "Let me guess. The random sheets of paper."

Liara turned a little bluer around the tentacles. "Actually, I misunderstood Shepard when she mentioned wrapping with paper."

"Oh. Well, it's still nice," Tali said diplomatically.

"It's the one with green paper," Joker said. "Just don't look too close; I may have reused a wrapper from something else."

"'Salarian hot'n'crisp jerky'?" Tali read aloud as she tore the cover off of a square box. "Do I want to know what it's made of?"

"Is it salarians?" Wrex asked, sounding interested.

"What? No, Wrex! It's a combination of pork and...other stuff," Joker said defensively. "Would you let Tali appreciate the great thing it is that I've given her?"

Tali pulled the tabs on the edge of the box so that the lid parted. Inside was a tiny wooden model of a quarian ship; one of the larger ones like where she'd been raised. "Joker...I...how did you know?" she asked softly, turning the little ship to and fro so she could study it from all sides.

"What, you didn't think these magic hands could just fly, did you?" Joker teased. "It wasn't hard. I just looked up the ship from your name. Easy."

"Not easy for me," Kaidan said as Tali passed the ship around to those wanting to examine it. "Nice, Joker."

"Well, I want to go next," Ashley spoke up. She offered Tali a hesitant smile. "The pink one, and I_ promise_ it's proper wrapping paper."

Tali gently lifted the tiny package and opened it carefully. A small silver coin-like pendant was nestled on a piece of cloth. The likeness of a human was tooled onto it; it didn't look expensive, rather it looked...personal. "Who is it?" she asked Ashley.

"That's Saint Christopher," Ashley hurried to explain. "There's an old Earth culture that regards him as the protector of travelers. Think of it as a good luck charm."

"I will," Tali promised, tracing the small image with her gloved finger. "Quarians are nothing if not travelers." She looked up at the human woman and said, "Thank you."

There was a pause as the other people looked between each other to see who was going to put forth their gift next.

"Fine," Wrex grumbled. "I don't know anything about this 'present' business, so I just left it alone." He pointed to a silver container standing tall among the remaining packages.

Tali picked it up and handled it experimentally. She located a release button and depressed it. With a hiss and a little cloud of vapor, the mini-cooler popped open. "Is that...no. Wrex, how did you...!" Tali jumped up and hugged the krogan, who eyeballed her as if she were crazy. Well, she was likely a little drunk by now, but regardless... "Where did you get quarian ale at this end of the galaxy?"

"Shepard has her ways, I have mine," was all Wrex would say, but the skin around his red eyes crinkled in what Tali had learned was amused pleasure.

"I'm saving this for a _special_ occasion," Tali said firmly, putting the precious bottle back inside the cooler.

"Okay, I guess it's my turn," Kaidan said, wincing slightly. "It's not original at all, Tali. Sorry." He pushed a package wrapped in simple brown paper to her.

The box was flat and thin, and Tali jiggled it a little cautiously before tearing the paper off. "Kaidan, it's perfect," she said with as much sincerity as she could muster. "Other species don't often think about what it's like to live in suits all the time. These are my favorite filters, I promise." Kaidan grinned at the praise, and straightened up a bit proudly.

"I can top that," Garrus insisted, setting down his cup long enough to point at the box with the odd, shiny sticker on top. No, it was a seal, Tali realized. The seal of one of the most prestigious omnitool making companies in the galaxy. "Now, before you go asking how, let's just say I had help." And here he winked at Shepard, who shrugged in mute conspiracy.

"It's...it's that model from last year, the best they've made for engineering..." Tali slipped the metal device out of its box and flicked it on. The new omnitool lit up and offered her the command setup. "Oh, I'll have to play with it later," she said with a small pout. But she leaned over and hugged Shepard, who had moved the last few presents out of the way in order to sit down again.

"I suppose I should give you my gift in hopes that you'll forget about the paper," Liara said, and Tali assured her it wouldn't change her opinion one way or the other. Inside the box were two data chips; both upgrades for the omnitool. She thanked the asari profusely until Liara blushed again.

Dr. Chakwas gave her the neatly-wrapped purple gift; it was a collection of dextro-friendly snacks and supplements, some of which Tali had never tried before. "Thank you," Tali told her. "It will be nice to get away from rations for a little while." She caught Garrus craning his neck to get a peek inside the box, and she held it away from him defensively. "These are mine, Garrus Vakarian. Go find yourself another doctor to work your wiles on." The turian flicked his mandibles at her in amusement.

"Okay, I know I went in with Garrus already, but this is just a little something extra," Shepard promised, handing Tali the last box. It wasn't wrapped, rather the box was made from a reflective paper decorated with little holographic sunbursts that shimmered under the lights when Tali turned it side to side. Inside was a book with hard cover. "_'The Adventures of Relli, Asterus, and Sallena'_," she read aloud. The picture on the front was of a quarian with an omnitool, a turian with some manner of simplistic weapon, and an asari obviously wielding biotic powers. All three were, judging by their size, late adolescents.

"I've...never heard of this book," Tali said, studying the text on the back.

Shepard grinned. "Figured you hadn't, as it's written by a human author. It's definitely good for some laughs, I promise. You'll see where I got my ideas about turians eating small wildlife pretty quick."

Garrus snorted. "We do not eat wildlife, Shepard. I don't care what you think the native Palaven animal _ressin_ looks like."

"They_ look_ like squirrels!" Shepard exclaimed, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. "Big squirrels with sandy-colored fur!"

"Shepard, how would _you_ know?" Kaidan countered. "You've never lived on Earth."

"I can still recognize a squirrel, Kaidan," she said with an eyeroll. "One step above rats."

"Cake!" Ashley interrupted before there could be an argument. "Shepard, this was your masterpiece; you have to do the honors for the birthday girl."

"Right!" Shepard said, getting up and clearing away some of the discarded wrapping paper and boxes. "And no jokes about my cooking."

"Too late," Joker muttered out of the side of his mouth.

"I didn't actually bake it; it's more of an ice cream cake," Shepard confessed, not having heard the pilot. She disappeared behind the bar for a second and then reemerged with some type of glass bowl. Inside were what Tali supposed had been layers of a cold confection at one time...but the dessert had somehow managed to solidify itself into prism-like structures. Very spiky, geometric structures.

Shepard's face fell as she looked at it. "I guess making sure it was processed to make it safe for quarians did something to it."

"I've never seen anything-" Tali began, but Liara cleared her throat. "-that looked so good," Tali finished smoothly. At the dubious look the commander gave her, Tali held up one hand. "If I'm to be this 'birthday girl' you've been talking about, then what I say goes. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and let me taste it." Shepard obediently dished up a bowl for her.

"Okay, those of you who know it, let's sing," Shepard announced, bringing the bowl over to Tali. "Kaidan, you're the least tone deaf."

Kaidan obliged. "Happy birthday to you..." Ashley, Joker, Dr. Chakwas, and Shepard all joined in. Liara hummed along, while Wrex and Garrus exchanged hangdog looks that plainly said,_ humans are strange._

"Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday dear Taliiiiiii..." they held the last note; Ashley giggled.

"Happy birthday to you!" And they burst into a round of applause.

"And for those of you concerned, don't worry, **_I_** baked the levo dessert," Ashley assured the rest of the room. "You better like chocolate, that's all I'm saying."

"Sign me up!" Joker exclaimed as Shepard pulled another container from behind the bar. She beckoned for Liara to come help her, and the asari handed Garrus his own dish of the spiky, geometric concoction as Shepard cut up the triple-layered brownies Ashley had made.

The rest of the party was filled with good-natured joking, teasing, and more dessert and drinks. By the end of it, Garrus challenged Tali to arm-wrestle for the last of the dextro dessert, and then was seen licking his bowl with his long, slender tongue. Tali caught the moment on her new omnitool, along with Wrex nearly headbutting Kaidan in a mad scramble for thirds on Ashley's brownies.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"I never told you, Shepard," Tali said to the camera, "but later I learned that humans make wishes on their birthdays. Quarians do, too, although we're not superstitious about sharing them afterwards. My wish was that we would always be friends...and now it's come true. Thank you for my first birthday party, Shepard. I'll talk to you again soon."

When she shut the camera drone off and stood to take it back to the other lounge, James stirred himself and finally stood up. He'd lost track of time, sitting there imagining everything as it happened. He could still hear the refrain of the song faintly, and was briefly regretful that he hadn't known Shepard and her friends back then.

"Couldn't sleep, James?" Tali asked, tilting her masked face up at him. Her eyes glowed brightly behind the semi-transparent plating, and he gave her a half-smile.

"Nah, I've got some things to do," he said. "Getting to that relay later today and everything. Need to make sure the_ Normandy's_ squared away."

Tali nodded and they walked together to the elevator. "I'll see you in a few hours, then."

"You got it, Sparks."

Tali laughed. "If you had seen the mess I made of the kitchen, you wouldn't just call me 'Sparks'."

"So I hear," James said. "You can bet I'll be showing up for that story."

"As I plan to do for your food fight," Tali answered with mischief in her voice. "Someone's got to stand up for Donnelly."

James pointed a finger at her. "Is that a challenge?"

"We'll see, Vega. We'll see."


	4. Day Three

_Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me). _

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Day Three_

Kaidan Alenko stared into the bottom of his empty coffee mug and debated for the second time whether or not he _really_ needed a fourth cup. He didn't mind early mornings as long as there was enough coffee to go with them...but they had to ration everything around here.

He sighed and took his mug to the mess hall sink, washing it out and leaving it to dry. It was just as well; Kaidan didn't want to appear jumpy in the meeting with the repair project overseer this morning. He checked the time and saw it was just after 0700. The shuttle would need to be prepped, but Vega was working on that. He'd assumed the shuttle schedule and related duties until Cortez's replacement was able to rendezvous with them.

_Well, not so much a replacement as just a handy refugee working his or her way home,_ he thought with a sigh. Whoever it was apparently was former Alliance, which meant there were some favors owed from somewhere higher up, and that translated into Kaidan agreeing and assigning him or her a bunk in the crew quarters.

_I don't know how Shepard managed to keep her head on straight when there's N7 __**and**__ the Council breathing down your neck,_ Kaidan groused mentally. It's so much easier to just point and shoot, like Garrus or Vega.

That wasn't fair, he realized a moment later. Just because neither of them had biotic abilities, it didn't give him a right to assume that there was nothing more to his squadmates. Garrus displayed a level of finesse with a sniper rifle that Kaidan could only envy. And James...well, the large marine was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, which apparently included poker, dancing, and tattoo design.

It was becoming more and more clear to him as Kaidan read reports, skimmed mission logs, and in general tried to decide how he was going to handle the situation at the Far Rim relay, that Shepard wore many hats as the commander. She also valued everyone for their unique and different talents, right down to Kaidan's love of beer and bacon. And he hadn't even managed to poison her.

The memory brought a smile to his face as he went to the elevator. He had felt disconnected after Shepard's death-he missed the _Normandy_ and the old squad. Kaidan hadn't felt like he'd belonged to a tight-knit group of friends since Jump Zero, and he'd vowed that would never happen again. But Shepard was different-she didn't motivate through threats and anger. Rather, she made you want to prove that you had something special inside you. And after spending any amount of time near Wrex or Liara, Kaidan had felt like he was 'just a human'.

Shepard thought that was nonsense. After all, she didn't have any biotic talent and wasn't a skull-crusher; she was more of a diplomat than anything else. As Garrus had once said to Kaidan before Ilos,_ "She's got charm coming out of places I've only seen on human xenobiology charts."_ Of course, that had all changed a couple of years later, making him a shade envious.

_Speaking of Garrus..._ Kaidan glanced around. There was something he wanted to ask the turian; something he hadn't thought about since after the _Normandy's_ first confrontation with Sovereign. In truth, Shepard had no idea it had ever happened because...well, she'd been dead.

He had a few minutes; he could stick his head into the main battery. Kaidan quickly retraced his steps and climbed the stairs to the doors. They parted in time for him to hear:

"Look, I'm in the middle of former geth space right now, and not really in a position to promise anything..." From the way his three-fingered hands were clenched on the terminal in front of him, safely out of the camera's pickup, Kaidan guessed that Garrus was in the middle of a conversation he'd rather not be having at the moment.

Thinking it might be a welcome distraction, Kaidan cleared his throat loudly. Garrus' head turned just enough that he could see who it was, and his browplates rose in a silent expression of relief.

"I promise that your concerns will be addressed," he told the fuzzy image of another turian, who looked like he was ready to keep arguing. "Supplies need to be rationed until more of the relays are back online, and I will personally be on the lookout for ships to divert to the Hercules system. I have other matters to handle now. Vakarian out." Garrus cut the connection and straightened up, rolling his shoulders with a sigh. "I'd forgotten just how much more of a responsibility it is to work for the government than working for Shepard," he said ruefully to Kaidan.

"Yeah," Kaidan agreed with a shake of his head. "Her crusade had the big picture in mind; I still don't exactly know how she did it sometimes, but...I'll learn."

"Something I can help you with?" Garrus asked, his tone curious.

"Yeah...listen, I was thinking of a memory to send...something she'd find funny. And well, you kinda have to admit in retrospect that our agreement to never drink together again stems from that one...incident."

Garrus froze suddenly as the event Kaidan was talking about came to mind. "You want to tell her about the bar fight? The _entire_ fight?" he asked incredulously. "Or just the part where the batarians showed up?"

"Good point," Kaidan said, rubbing his chin while he thought about it. "You know her sense of humor better, what do you think?"

"Anything that makes me look socially awkward is a win with Shepard," Garrus said with an exaggerated sigh. "I suppose the mental image of you diving over a table to tackle me and hitting that asari dancer instead would make her day."

"It's not nearly as funny unless we include the part about how you started singing krogan battle songs while standing on top of the bar's neon sign," Kaidan retorted.

"Oh, yeah," Garrus remembered with a faint grin. "Wrex would have been proud that I remembered all the words, considering how much brandy I'd had. He'd be more proud if he knew how many people I headbutted, too."

"So does that mean you'll go in with me on the message?" Kaidan asked.

The turian shrugged. "Why not? Set up a time with Allers' drone and let me know when to be there."

Kaidan nodded. "On it. And thanks." He checked the time, and made an abrupt about-face just as a message from Tali popped up on his omnitool. He ignored it and walked as quickly as he could while not actually running to the elevator.

Tali and Traynor were already seated in the Kodiak, and the quarian looked up almost quizzically as he swung himself inside and closed the hatch.

"About time, Major," James called back from the pilot's seat. "Sparks wanted me to leave you behind."

"I said no such thing," Tali defended herself. "I only asked what would happen if we were to show up at the meeting without you."

Kaidan wasn't sure how to respond for a moment. "I'm sure somebody somewhere would have been disappointed," he finally answered with a deadpan expression. "But this is-_was_-a geth-controlled system. Whatever's left is likely all defunct. It's a miracle that there are other organics here at all, given the warnings to all ships before Shepard brokered that treaty."

Tali's helmet drooped for a moment. "Yes," she said after a pause. "I've read the reports the project leader sent to us. They're surprisingly detailed for a civilian organization, but they confirm that there are no geth energy readings from either system-Dholan and Ma'at. It is evident that some machinery might still be functioning, but probably only because it was left running."

The _Normandy_ had arrived in official Far Rim space yesterday, a few hours behind schedule. They had stopped to patch another comm buoy on their way to the Dholan system, and they had come across a couple of derelict geth ships, which had been salvaged for fuel and some spare parts. Javik and Tali had headed up the boarding party; Tali being a whiz at knowing what would be worth the most, and Javik had the most time on his hands. James had offered to go, but Kaidan had needed him to take over Cortez's job first.

In what would have been considered the evening, the _Normandy_ had finally arrived within viewing distance of the Far Rim relay. The once-glowing model of alien technology was now dark in many places, and the ethereal blue-white light at the heart of the relay had been extinguished.

In loose formation around the relay were a couple of mid-sized ships and several smaller ones. The Far Rim had been off-limits to civilians for years; Kaidan was honestly surprised that there would be anyone left to work on relay repairs with the geth deactivated. He suspected these were freelance merchants operating slightly outside galactic commerce laws, but with everybody still licking their figurative wounds and recovering, there was really nothing worth fighting about just yet. As long as they had the common goal of fixing the relay network and hostilities could be kept to a minimum, the Alliance was willing to temporarily overlook certain...career choices. After all, Commander Shepard wouldn't have enlisted the help of Aria T'Loak if she hadn't been willing to take the same chance.

James piloted the Kodiak close to the largest ship of the bunch; some kind of converted freighter that was bristling with a moderate amount of guns. _"Northen Star_, this is the _Normandy_ shuttle. Permission to dock."

_"Granted. Transmitting vector."_

Minutes later, the shuttle bumped gently against the deckplates of the_ Northern Star,_ and Kaidan led the small group into the bay. The shuttle bay also doubled as a large cargo hold, and it was neatly-kept, albeit mostly empty. What few crates of supplies there were had guards posted by them, likely to enforce rationing. Although, Kaidan noticed that it appeared that some geth tech had begun to find its way aboard, likely through salvage efforts.

Somewhere up above, a door hissed open, and a large, balding man came to the edge of the catwalk that surrounded the upper edge of the cargo bay. "You're the Alliance guys?" he called down.

"Yes, sir. I'm Major Kaidan Alenko, this is Admiral Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, Communications Specialist Samantha Traynor, and Lieutenant James Vega." Kaidan introduced each of his companions in turn. "Are you Overseer Brayden?"

The large man snorted. "Naw. Just his trusty sidekick. You can call me Larry. Come on up," he said, gesturing to a rusted metal staircase off to one side. "Hate to curse you with it, but we are sure glad you got knocked to the aft-end of the galaxy so we'd have some help with these repairs," Larry said, eyeing the party up and down, from their weapons to their datapads. "We're not big on keeping brilliant engineers in our organization, and we're probably doing things all wrong."

"I'm sure we'll be able to work something out...Larry," Tali said diplomatically as they reached the catwalk. "I've never repaired a mass relay before, but..."

"But we have to do it, right?" Larry said with a humorless grin. "Otherwise we're all stuck out here." He made a motion and went back through the doors he'd entered. The_ Normandy_ crew followed, taking in the well-worn look of the ship. It was definitely an older model that had been retrofitted for different purposes. Some of the technology looked like it had been patched in at random just to provide a means to get by, and then forgotten about. More than once, Kaidan ducked a bundle of wires hanging from the ceiling, or stepped around cables coiled on the floor.

"Brayden doesn't care if the house looks clean, as long as Rhian keeps the old girl moving," Larry said when Traynor almost tripped. They got into an elevator and he selected the third deck.

"So what sort of commercial business is the _Northern Star_ involved in?" Traynor asked curiously. Kaidan's gaze shifted to Larry, who grinned, showing a missing tooth.

"A little bit of everything, I suppose. Y'could call us pioneers. One of the first to take chances trading with the geth. But why not? They had some crazy ideas, but they're efficient, inventive, and wanted to improve-" He glanced over at Tali suddenly, as if just noticing she was a quarian.

"That's right, they were," Tali agreed softly. "They were helping my people rebuild on Rannoch, providing us with means to live free again..." She paused. "I wish we knew more about what had happened to them; why wasn't the red energy wave more selective?"

Larry shook his head. "Darned if I know. I just move heavy things and shoot when told. I'm no scientist, but we've got logs from when it happened, as well as some deactivated geth. Rhian, our engineer, started looking into it, but with all the relay repairs, she doesn't have time to do it now."

"I'd be grateful if I could see more of her work," Tali said, some of the sadness easing in her voice. "I looked over a few reports the overseer sent over, but I'd like her perspective." Kaidan made a mental note to follow up with her; he'd been reading Shepard's reports from before the war...and something didn't sit well with him. Something from Tali's trial...

The elevator doors parted and Larry preceded them out, waving a couple of guards aside. Ahead was what looked like a control center, complete with holographic projector array,which was currently displaying schematics of some sort.

"Okay, when the B Team gets back from Gotha with the new shipments of palladium and eezo, we'll be able to finish these three sections," a young man was saying to an asari holding a datapad. "Rhiannon's already got the power in place but until we repair the structure, there's no sense in proceeding any further." The asari finished her notes and nodded before moving off to a separate terminal.

"Brayden, Major Alenko," Larry said to the young man. "Seems a good sort."

Overseer Brayden was probably no more than twenty-five years old; he had a shock of unruly blond hair that made Kaidan suspect he was a biotic. He was a slight, almost skinny kid who squinted a bit near-sightedly at the newcomers.

"Aha, Major," Brayden said, holding out his hand. Kaidan shook it quickly, and noticed with some surprise that the kid had a grip on him, despite being wiry. He wondered if Brayden had had any biotic training, and if the rationing had worn him down.

"Overseer Brayden. We're here to help get the relay running and make sure your people will be in good shape while everything gets sorted out."

"It's a mess," Brayden agreed, bouncing a little on his toes. "Please," he said, waving his hand at the holographic display. "I'd love to know more about what I'm looking at. I can get my teams to patch up the relay all day long, but as for getting this alien thing working..." he coughed suddenly and looked sideways at Tali. "Nothing against aliens, of course."

"No need, Overseer," Tali said. "These are alien things to me, too. May I?" At Brayden's nod, she began to fiddle with the projected schematics.

While she did that, Kaidan asked, "How bad was the relay hit, initially?"

"Not sure," Brayden replied, looking up at the ceiling and working his head from side to side while he thought. "We weren't near the relay at the time, but when our entire geth trading team just...deactivated, we investigated. We were supposed to be trading for some useful upgrades for ship defenses. At first, we just thought the lights had gone out, but then pieces of the superstructure started to fall apart. I'd say the relay lost about forty percent of its structural integrity. We've been patching everything up, but we can't cut corners. And there's not very many of us."

The young man started pacing in a large circle around the holographic display, exuding an almost twitchy sort of energy. Apparently Kaidan needn't have worried about the extra cup of coffee earlier. "Right now, we're in danger of not having enough rations to feed all the crews for the duration of the repairs. There's no agriculture or farming out here for even basic things."

"Have you been communicating with any of the other relay projects?" Traynor asked. Brayden shook his head so rapidly his hair sparked. _Definitely a biotic. Probably L3, _Kaidan mused.

"We've tried, but the QEC's on the fritz. That's one project I wish Rhian would make time for."

"I'll take a look," Traynor volunteered. "The more input we can get from other relays making repairs, the more information we have for the problem, and the better the chance at solving it right the first time." Brayden's eyebrows went up, but he took her to the communications station and the young woman got to work.

"So tell me what you've got set up in terms of duty rotations, crew assignments, and other operations," Kaidan said as Tali continued to play with the holographic display.

"Right." With a little hop, Brayden went over to a table laden with papers, pads, and some quick drawings. "Aysith Enterprises sent a small fleet with me, just in case there were...complications."

"You mean fighters?" James asked.

"A few, but mostly extra supplies and cargo transport because we knew the geth didn't have any extra resources if we were here for an extended period." Brayden riffled through the papers and laid several of them out so Kaidan could see them. "I have rotations of the cargo ships going out to collect ores and other raw materials from the nearest planets. The B Team is on its way here, and the C Team will follow in two days while the A Team starts a run back out."

Kaidan and James took a look at the various diagrams. "Basic but effective," James said. "If you added one more team, though, you wouldn't have a gap in turnaround between Teams C and A."

"I know, but we don't have any ships to spare; the others are all working on refining the elements and fabricating new parts," Brayden said, rubbing his hair vigorously enough that a few sparks leapt between his fingers. "It's crude, but we've managed to repurpose some of the geth stations. I only wish we could get them to maximum efficiency, but there's no way. The geth were their own AI, so we're doing everything manually."

"All right," Tali said, breaking into the conversation. "I think with the help of Adams, Donnelly, and Daniels we can at least recreate the mass effect field safely. We'll start by speaking with anybody who knows how to hold a spanner. We need to get capable engineers into the places they're needed most."

"You've got it. We won't be able to include C Team, but we'll get the rest together," Brayden promised.

"And if we add the _Normandy_ into your team rotation as the D Team, we'll close that gap in the ore runs," James pointed out. "We've got probes and collection equipment."

Kaidan nodded. "We'll also check with your medical people and see what we can do about your ration problem. Tali, when you have an estimate about how long the work will take, let me know."

Brayden turned to the asari, who had somehow been roped into helping Traynor dismantle part of the comm station. "Merya, where's Holloway? Tell her her new ship's here."

"Is that the former Alliance refugee I received orders about?" Kaidan asked. "They didn't give a name."

"Yep. She's been working as a mechanic for Aysith to pay off a debt she owed Maru, one of the other co-owners. I don't know her that well, not being Alliance myself, but she's done her duty to us, so no reason to keep her on unless she wanted to stay."

Merya spoke up. "Meg's saying she can't leave until she fixes whatever damage Narg did to his shuttle this time around."

"Well, we're not going anywhere right away," Kaidan said. "Just have her warn us so we can coordinate a pick-up."

"Thanks, Major," Brayden said with a lopsided smile. "I feel like home just got a lot closer for all of us."

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Hannah Shepard awoke with a crick in her neck and a dry feeling in her mouth. She'd fallen asleep on the couch in her daughter's room, just after the doctors had returned her after the latest surgery, this one to restore mobility in her right hand. It had gone well, the surgeon assured her. The commander probably wouldn't even notice a difference.

For this particular surgeon, who was a salarian well known in the field, that was high praise indeed. He didn't dispense positive outlooks often, but Hannah was thankful that it seemed like her daughter was going to change his mind this once.

When she looked over at the curtained bed, she saw a nurse checking her daughter's vital signs. The admiral rubbed her neck, kneading it a little bit to try and get the kink out. "Any better?" she asked quietly.

"Sorry ma'am, I didn't mean to disturb you," the nurse said, turning slightly. She was middle-aged, with a round face. "But she's getting stronger. Some of her counts are up slightly, and her heart rate has stabilized consistently in the past twenty-four hours."

Hannah smiled to herself and chanced a sigh of relief. It might not seem like much, but it was a step forward. Although there was no possible way that her daughter was conscious enough to know exactly what the messages her mother played for her said, Hannah was beginning to believe that it still made a difference. Even if that difference was an improvement in her own morale, it counted for something.

The nurse excused herself as Hannah checked her omnitool out of habit. She scrolled through the new reports, refugee counts, supply statuses, looking for anything new from the _Normandy_. The quarian-Tali-had been a welcome distraction yesterday when Hannah had been informed of the next surgery. And to hear how her daughter's crew had taken to their commander made her proud. They might laugh and tease, but it made them sound all the more like a family, even in the short glimpse she'd had of them through Tali's birthday party.

At the bottom of her message list, she finally spotted a transmission from the _Normandy_. There were three files; a greeting from Karin Chakwas to Hannah herself, providing a current status report of the _Normandy's_ arrival at the Far Rim relay. There was also a quick hello from an engineer named Adams, who had abruptly been called away in the middle of his message, so he promised to get back to Shepard soon, hinting at something going on between two of his other engineers. Hannah raised an eyebrow at that-she hoped it wasn't too serious.

The last and longest file featured the turian-Garrus Vakarian, as Hannah had come to find out. She'd known him only by reputation until two days ago. Her daughter had never spoken much about her personal life-it had been a long time since Hannah had heard about any kind of attachment, especially after what had happened on Shepard's first assignment to a ship.

_So you're the one she's chosen to trust,_ Hannah thought, studying Garrus' image. Of course, the instant she'd sensed that his _'I love you'_ in the first message had been intensely serious, she had pulled up every resource she could find on him, short of calling that primarch who was now aboard what remained of the turian fleet.

Garrus was something of an enigma; he didn't follow the rules-not at least in the turian sense. He'd been one of the first supporters in the search to find Saren and bring him to justice, and he didn't care a fig about red tape or bureaucracy. He had fought alongside her daughter, protecting her it seemed on nearly every mission, according to the briefs Hannah had read. Everything from facing the creature Saren had become, to rescuing her from batarian kidnappers.

Sometime after Shepard's supposed death, he had disappeared for awhile. There was no official intel about it; a lot had changed in those two years and he might have been gone for good. But her daughter had found him, convinced him to face hell with her once more, and apparently expressed something that was more than just friendship to him. However their relationship had started, Hannah wasn't disappointed in any sense. She had seen her daughter try and fail often in her childhood to make friendships that lasted, much less a successful romantic relationship.

When her daughter had surrendered herself and her ship for disciplinary action regarding what had happened at the Alpha Relay, she'd lost contact with almost everyone. In that time, Garrus had become an important advisor to the turian military back on Palaven. Hannah was impressed with his ability to succeed in attempting to prepare his homeworld and his people for the Reaper invasion nobody else seemed concerned about. He'd had no official military rank other than advisor, but nonetheless the turian defenses had done a better job of holding off the initial invasion than Earth's, and it was probably in part to his hard work. It occurred to Hannah that he'd have been put to the best use by staying with his people, but the minute Commander Shepard had shown up on Menae, it seemed their paths had crossed again, and then stayed crossed.

_As if you needed proof he was loyal,_ Hannah thought to herself. _A man like that could go anywhere, command his own fleet or battalion. But instead he went back to her to cover her back once more._ And Hannah found that she already respected him.

But as a dutiful, somewhat nosy mother, there were a few things she had to do.

"Starting with..." Hannah murmured, queuing up his video. She moved to her daughter's bedside and let the recording play.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"Hey!" Shepard's hair tumbled down around her ears as she belatedly ducked. Slowly, with exaggerated patience she drummed her fingers on the edge of the workbench in engineering.

"I...have been wanting to do that for weeks," Garrus confessed, his subtones vibrating in amusement. He held the elastic band between his thumb and forefinger as Shepard blew a strand of hair out of her eyes and turned to face him.

"I thought we agreed that we'd blow off our steam _later,"_ she said, sounding annoyed. He was still learning the nuances of human expression through speech, but her narrowed eyes helped communicate her mild displeasure. "You know I put my hair up when I'm serious about working."

"Yes, but you do look nice when you're trying to fine-tune that thing," Garrus said. "You know...calibrating..."

"Right, right, you have a thing for calibrations," Shepard said, holding out her hand demandingly for the elastic. "Not now, Garrus, I...I need to work on this." She gestured to the mess she'd made of her drone.

He'd stopped, confused. Usually she enjoyed a little playful banter when they ran into each other at random times throughout the ship. Today, she just seemed...grumpy.

"Is this the part where I stand in the corner and throw chocolate at you?" he asked after a moment's thought. "I'd be safe, right? Your drone's in pieces, so...you couldn't reach me."

Shepard's eyebrows went up. "What in the...did Mordin send_ you_ files, too?"

Garrus rolled his eyes. "Please, Shepard, give me a little credit. I did work in C-Sec in a division that had some female officers. There was always a remarkable dip in the crime rate once every five weeks; I think some of the lowlifes didn't want to attract the women's attention. They tended to adopt a no-mercy policy during 'shark week'." He continued to hold the elastic out of reach.

She sighed and ran her fingers through her hair, tucking it behind her ears. "Lucky for you, not all the women on the _Normandy_ have subconsciously decided to sync their hormones. And, we get to shoot at things a lot, which helps." Shepard waved one hand at him dismissively before turning back to her work.

Garrus pounced; he had his fingers in her hair before she knew what had happened. Shepard stiffened and opened her mouth to say something, but then paused. With a little sigh, she rested her chin in her hand. "Looks like I win this round of cross-species discovery," Garrus teased with a quiet chuckle. He stroked her hair, admiring its shine and softness. Humans were the only sentient race to have this particular physical feature, and he'd never thought about how it might feel to touch it. It was silky, like some of the finer fabrics he'd seen, but it was also slippery and moved through his fingers unpredictably. No wonder Shepard had a hard time containing it when she wanted to put it up.

"I hope you know that this is now my new favorite activity," he said in a low voice, pitching his subtones into the 'smooth talker' range.

"Mm," was Shepard's only reply. He glanced down, and saw that her eyes were closed.

"Shepard?" Garrus prompted, mandibles twitching in amused curiosity.

"What?" she asked, not opening her eyes.

"Did I just turn your brain off? Where's your witty comeback or threat?"

"Oh monkey feathers..." Shepard seemed to come to herself all at once and pulled her head forward out of his reach. She quickly put her hair back in order as much as possible before turning to face him. "You..." she started to say, but Garrus' grin said it all.

"What is that called? An Achilles' heel?" The gloat in his voice would have been obvious even without the flanging.

Shepard's face turned pink. "I don't want to talk about it." But a traitorous smile pulled at the edges of her mouth nonetheless.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

_"I know I never told you I'd never touched a human's hair before, but that was one of my first desires after I...knew I had a chance. With you,"_ Garrus said hastily. _ "It also came in pretty handy when you were staying up for days at a time, worrying about uniting the galaxy."_ He paused; sighed. _"I wish I could be there, Shepard, more than anything. Listen to me, don't give up. The Reapers tried to kill you once, and all it did was make you want to live every moment as if it counted. Hold on to that, because there's a moment coming that belongs just to us. And I won't let you let it go."_ He held the camera drone's gaze, as if he could see through it to Shepard's still form. _"I love you."_

Hannah Shepard smiled a bit tearily before turning off the video. She looked down into her daughter's face, where the skin weave was still taking to her scarred skin. "I think I like him, baby. I don't know him much yet, but I plan to."

And with that, Hannah Shepard wiped her face, checked her hair, and adjusted her omnitool to record a message of her own.


	5. Day Four

_Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me)._

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Day Four_

It was only mid-morning, and Tali felt like the mountain of datapads and paperwork spread out in the conference room were already up to her helmet. She sighed and wished for the thirty-second time that she was in a clean room so she could take off her faceplate and rub her eyes.

With the help of Kaidan, James, and Liara, the_ Normandy_ crew had been dispersed among the Aysith Enterprises fleet to strengthen the workforce. The ship herself had one more days before it departed to Gotha as the D Team in ore retrieval, so that meant Tali had to decide to go aboard the _Northern Star_ as a temporary passenger in order to better oversee operations, or stay on the_ Normandy_.

She'd already packed a bag and gotten extra dextro rations together, but she still wasn't sure she wanted to leave the ship-_her_ ship-even for a little while. For one thing, it would take too much to try and correct her name.

_Oh, who am I kidding?_ Tali thought with an unseen eyeroll. _ I just don't want to leave what's familiar...now that I have it back._ It had been hard enough standing trial when it seemed as if the quarian people as a whole were turning their backs on her (the exceptions being Veetor and Kal'Reegar). Life just seemed simpler on the_ Normandy_, but Tali couldn't fool herself that it would last. She held a high position among her people, and with all the rebuilding on Rannoch...she needed to get home, now that there was one just for her.

Was this what that scared quarian kid had wanted back on 2183 when she had been ambushed in that alley in the lower wards of the Citadel? Had she wanted to get dragged into the middle of a multi-species confrontation; be made into the vid-screen model of hope for the quarian people because of achievements she'd made?

Tali sighed, and the filters in her suit whisked the carbon dioxide away with the vague hum they'd always had. _They were all achievements made by Commander Shepard,_ she reminded herself. _Your people just wanted a quarian to get some credit._

_"That's not true,"_ she could almost hear Shepard say. _"You knew what to look for. I'm only an infiltrator-turned-combat engineer; what do I know about rewriting code, patching a mass relay, or reprogramming deactivated geth?"_

"Nothing," Tali answered aloud. "But you could have figured it out." She'd already requested and received status reports from the two closest relays: the Pylos Nebula and the Shadow Sea. Traynor had said the Pylos relay would need some major work; even more than the Far Rim relay, and she'd been right. Thankfully, there was much more relay traffic in that area due to being a pathway to Omega that at least laborers weren't in such short supply. The Shadow Sea relay had been all but spared most of the destruction; getting the relay field rekindled and the rings moving was basically the only problem. It would be a faster way out of the Far Rim region, but in the end it would only lead them in a circle through the Nubian Expanse back to the heavily-damaged Caleston Rift relay.

Thankfully, however, the engineers in charge had been able to give her their best scans and information on how a fully-repaired and operational relay should be, and taken a lot of guesswork out of everything. It would hopefully also quicken the repair process now that Brayden and his people weren't working with an incomplete set of data.

_Of course, what would make the repairs the fastest would be to fix all the geth,_ a little voice in her head told her. Tali tried unsuccessfully to shake it away. Nobody knew the geth quite like the quarians, and even then...she knew from Legion just how little the quarians had truly understood their creations.

In any case, she wasn't going to have time to analyze what exactly had caused the geth's demise, the same way she hadn't had a chance to really look into EDI's code. EDI had safeguarded her programming very closely, and Tali doubted that with the AI's ability to upgrade and alter her own code at will that there was any official record of the last 'operating system' EDI had had. _It was probably a conglomeration of the original VI, the Cerberus programming, and that Reaper code,_ Tali thought, then shook her head.

"Tali'Zorah, you do not have _time_ to go off on tangents," she told herself sternly. "You need to get home." She finished scrolling through the datapad she'd been holding for the last ten minutes and set it aside in the stack of information she was gathering for Donnelly. She'd assigned him and Gabby Daniels to begin the most crucial work of all: restarting the mass effect field. Between the two of them, and with the other engineers triple-checking all the calculations, Tali had confidence that the job would be done far more efficiently than if she were to try and spearhead the project all by herself.

Personally, she was going to be working with Rhiannon, the Aysith engineer, on restoring the structure and functionality of the relay proper. The best way to do that was going to be to stay on the_ Northern Star_, and Tali muttered a little under her breath at the realization. First, however, she had to finish parceling out all these other tasks and then have James get the shuttle ready for her. Oh, and she wanted to send a message to Shepard, because she wouldn't have the chance for a few days.

She'd checked her recipe files carefully and chosen an easy one: _peia_ fruit served on a thin, crispy pastry. It was a quarian dessert, so Tali had no idea if Garrus had ever tried it, but he was usually game for anything once. She was also reasonably sure that even Shepard could cut a piece of fruit up properly, sprinkle it with the appropriate spices, and then toast the rolled-out pastry dough until it was done. Assemble, and finished. It couldn't be that hard.

_At least, I hope not,_ Tali thought with a wince. With another sigh, she got back into her work.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"Liara T'Soni, I need some work to do."

Liara looked up quickly from the War Room display. "Javik? I didn't hear you come in."

Javik paced around the circumference of the room. "My warrior stealth is as honed as ever. Also, you were distracted." The prothean rested his hands on the railing, overlooking the lower level near the holographic display. "It seems all the engineers and crewman have their duties, but I do not. I wish for a task."

The asari blinked at him. "I...well, Javik you're a soldier."

"I know, and that is what makes this hard. There is no war here, no strife. What am I to fight as the avatar of vengeance?" Javik's four-eyed gaze regarded her seriously.

Liara considered. "I suppose fighting against our eventual starvation by helping repair the relay is a little too mundane for you."

The prothean pushed away from the railing and began pacing again. "Tell me where to go and how to help, and I will, no matter how primitive."

Liara nodded, and couldn't help but smile. "I guess we'll make a peaceful helper out of you yet, Javik. I'll contact James and see if he'll put you in a duty rotation."

"Thank you, Dr. T'Soni." Javik turned for the door.

"Oh, and Javik?" Liara called after him.

He turned back. "Yes?"

"You might see the quartermaster for some work clothes. Just so...you don't dent your armor." Liara suggested helpfully.

She saw his shoulders heave with a sigh. And then there was a grumble that sounded something like: "I'm going soft." The doors swished closed behind him.

Once she was sure he was gone, Liara permitted herself a self-satisfied snicker. Pictures were going to be taken and sent to Shepard, on general principle. Also, for gratuitous laughter.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Garrus put the finishing touches on his proposal to supply rations, medical supplies, and support personnel to the Hercules system, just as he'd promised Captain Naevius he would do when Kaidan had come by yesterday. It involved some rerouting through a couple of the further relays, and the realization that it would (in the short term) be a one-way trip until the Attican Beta relay was back online. However, since that relay sourced four other locations that had no other way of getting reinforcements or supplies, it was key that the Attican Beta relay get restored as quickly as possible so anyone stranded further out could get help.

With some relief, and no small sense of grim satisfaction, Garrus typed out an email to Naevius, attached the proposal, and copied General Septimus on it. He was about to turn his omnitool off, when he noticed a message from Kaidan.

_Didn't know how long we'd need, so I reserved the drone for a couple hours tomorrow night,_ the text read. _Unless you've changed your mind._

Garrus was quick to reply. _If you're getting cold feet, Alenko, just say so. I'm still in._

By the time he finished that message, his omnitool had taken it upon itself to update his inbox. He had no less than fourteen new messages in the last five minutes. Garrus sighed through his teeth; he needed a break before he threw himself full-tilt back into these problems. He glanced through the senders' names to make sure Victus or some of the other admirals weren't among them...and his gaze lit on one in particular that made his double-heartbeat patter to a stop.

_Shepard, H. R. Adm., Alliance._

He'd known all along, if somewhat intellectually, that Shepard's mom was out there somewhere. Shepard's outlook during the final war preparations had gotten slightly brighter once she'd finally received confirmation that her mother was alive and safe, helping to work on the Crucible project. Garrus momentarily felt guilty; in Shepard's absence, was he expected to check in with the rear admiral? She must have heard about her daughter's condition, but was she also trapped in a faraway system, only able to hear reports and wish that there was some way she could be with her only child?

The message from H. Shepard was a video message, and he stared at the blinking indicator in uncertainty. At least she wasn't requesting a vidcom call, which were reserved only for Admiral Hackett and the Council at the moment. That would have really put him on the spot, and Garrus didn't think he knew enough about human customs to safely undertake speaking to Shepard's mother in real time. What was expected of him? Would she demand to know his intentions, or make threats, or demand an entire background search?

Garrus tried to recall the speech his own dad had made to that young turian Solana had seen a few times, but he got the feeling that Marius Vakarian was intimidating enough without needing to show any potential beau of his daughter's his rifle collection. Plus, humans did not have that strict, military upbringing and discipline native to turians-at least, most of them didn't. A sudden thought occurred to him, however: Shepard had told him that both of her parents served in the Alliance since before she was born. Perhaps the rear admiral would be more like a turian than he thought.

Not that it made it any less intimidating when Garrus finally nerved up enough to open the message.

An eerily-familiar face materialized; it was clear that Shepard got her eyes and smooth complexion from her mother. There were wrinkles around the edges of the rear admiral's mouth, and her eyes had that shadowed, tired look that he had seen on his girlfriend's face so many times before the end of the war.

_"Garrus Vakarian, my name is Hannah Shepard. You may already know, though I highly doubt it since she hardly remembers to mention these things, that I am Commander Shepard's mother."_

Garrus' mandibles twitched outward in a brief expression of amusement at the admiral's wry tone. Shepard _was_ pretty bad about correspondence. She never deleted or sorted her emails; just let them sit all jumbled together in her inbox, primarily unanswered. Maybe that was the reason why Admiral Hackett made sure he was so often available on vidcom; he knew that his leading commander would never find time to communicate with him otherwise.

_"I feel it's only fair I let you know that I've been the one receiving and playing the video messages for my daughter. After the one you just sent, I thought ..."_ Hannah Shepard's pixelated face relaxed slightly as she glanced away from the camera and smiled as if to herself. Garrus blinked rapidly as his left mandible twitched in embarrassment.

_Well,_ he tried to tell himself, _at least Shepard's with her mother and not alone in all this. And at least it's not the nursing staff who are secretly going to be laughing whenever they see me and Kaidan._ Then he nearly groaned aloud. _She's never going to want me to date Shepard after the bar story comes out!_ Was it too late to message Kaidan back and call it off?

_Suck it up, Vakarian,_ he told himself sternly. _You're not doing this for you, you're doing it for Shepard. That story could probably make even the salarian dalatrass at least smile._ He forced himself to direct his attention back to Hannah Shepard's message.

_"I know a mother's intuition isn't much to go on, particularly when said mother isn't a doctor or anything, but...I know she's improved since the messages started coming. And...maybe it's cliched to think, but...she might even respond to your messages the best. I haven't found out that much about you, Garrus-"_

The turian braced himself; here came the threat.

_"-but I'd like to know the man who loves my daughter for more than just his service record, which seems to be mainly watching her backside...in more ways than one."_

A surprised chuckle escaped Garrus before he even realized it; there was no mistaking the salacious tone in Hannah Shepard's voice. _ I see where you get your secret naughty streak from, Shepard,_ he thought.

_"So here's a story from the Shepard family archives, Garrus. I'm right here with our girl, so you'll both get to hear it."_

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"What's camping?" the littlest Shepard asked curiously from where she was sitting between her Mima and Hannah.

"Camping is when you go out into the forest, away from all the cities and lights, and spend time exploring," her father, Jonathan Shepard explained. "I used to do it all the time with my brothers."

"So...an adventure," his daughter said slowly, concentrating on her 'r' sound. "Will we find pi-rates or r-rescue hostages?"

"No, but we'll probably toast marshmallows and catch glow-flies," her father said. "Have you ever seen a glow butterfly?" He knew she hadn't, but he waited for the negative shake of her head before saying, "Well, if you catch a bunch and put them in a jar, then keep them until just before you go to bed, you can make a wish. Then you let them all go and the butterflies take that wish up to the stars and ask them to make it come true."

"But...aren't there_ twees_-tr-rees in the forest?" his daughter asked, eyes wide. "Will they eat me?"

"No, baby," Hannah said, cringing a little. She hadn't taken time to explain to her parents that their granddaughter had a fear of the outdoors. It seldom had reason to manifest itself aboard an Alliance ship. "You'll see, it will be okay."

It wasn't until they had arrived at her parents' house and Hannah had gotten her little girl settled for a nap after the long ride that she had a chance to speak with her parents, Rex and Shae, about this 'camping trip'.

"I'm sorry, sweetie, we thought it would be all right," her mother apologized. "It's only for two nights, and we're not even technically leaving the new, expanded colony limits. It's a natural park, recently increased in size thanks to a generous gift to the park preservation association. I know that Jonathan used to enjoy camping, and thought he might want to share a memory with his daughter. You didn't mind it either when you were a child," she reminded.

"I know Mom, it's just...she's afraid of the strangest things right now, and Jon and I think it's partially because she's never spent any time on a planet."

"Well, this is in a nice, controlled environment," Shae insisted. "It's a cabin and a tent, with real beds and a cook stove and everything. Less than a mile from the hiking trails and a little river, so not a lot of travel. It's light camping, if that."

Hannah had sighed. "I guess...that would be okay."

_Famous last words,_ she found herself thinking the next morning as the five of them departed the skycar. Her daughter was practically glued to her right leg, her eyes wide as she looked around at all the large scary trees and other green foliage around her. "Okay, baby, I need you to be brave, all right?" Hannah said, kneeling down to talk to the little girl. "We're adventurers on a mission now, and we're going to get to our base camp. I have a very important job for you."

"What's my r-rank?" the littlest Shepard asked, letting go long enough to stand up straight in her best soldier fashion.

"What rank do all soldiers start at?" Hannah asked.

"Cadet," her daughter replied, proud she'd remembered.

"All right, so you're Cadet Shepard. And right now your mission is to take this bag," and Hannah handed her the small travel bag packed with her stuffed toy and books, "and help us find the base camp."

Her daughter had heard enough stories about daddy's away missions that she was familiar with the idea of moving through various terrain in search of outposts, base camps, and even beacons. She took the bag eagerly and slung it on her back. The four adults distributed the rest of the gear and groceries between them. Hannah's father, Rex checked in with the campground owners and took the electronic key they gave him.

"All right troops, let's go," Rex said. "Cadet, why don't you walk up front-er, take point-with Poppa?" He smiled as his granddaughter skipped up and took his hand, pleased that he was part of her adventure.

The central pathway leading into the forested area was well clear of any plants or fauna, and the sunlight filtering down through the leaves made a dancing, dappled pattern on the ground that seemed to mesmerize the little girl at the head of the party. Hannah found herself enjoying the entirely wonderful smell that was _real_ atmosphere, and she realized how much she had missed her home.

A half mile walk brought them to a comfortable little cabin, and Rex opened the door with his key. It was all classic hardwood, furnished sparsely with cushioned benches, a quilt or two, and woven rugs. There was a small sitting room, and attached was a tiny kitchenette, a single bathroom, and a bedroom with a double bed.

'Cadet' Shepard looked around the small dwelling eagerly; it was larger than most of the ship cabins she'd lived in, and the furniture was completely new to her. She carefully put her assigned bag on a nearby chair and went to look at some manner of toy bin in the sitting area.

"So, do we get the tent outside?" Jonathan asked his in-laws with an innocent grin.

"We thought that would be all right; there's a full-cushion in the base, so...we'll keep the little angel in here with us at night." Rex trailed off suggestively and waggled his gray eyebrows at his daughter. Hannah swatted her father's arm.

"Hey Cadet Shepard!" Jonathan called to his daughter. She jumped to her feet and stood at her best imitation of 'attention'. "Good job finding our base camp, but now we have to set it up. Can you help Mima with putting away the groceries?"

By the afternoon, Hannah had seen fit to promote Cadet Shepard to Lieutenant Shepard, "for her ability to follow orders, explore the campsite, and guard Poppa and Mima on their 'scouting expedition' (otherwise known as a 'hike')". In place of a rank badge, Hannah had pinned a paper star cut out from a cracker box to the sleeve of 'Lieutenant Shepard's' shirt. She'd never seen her daughter grin so proudly.

That night, Jonathan helped his newly-promoted daughter to toast her very first marshmallow over their campfire, and Hannah relished the expression on the little girl's face as she tried to eat the melty, sticky confection. After that, the three of them spent an hour collecting glow-flies until it was too dark to safely move around in the woods. Then Rex treated them all to a couple of silly ghost stories until bedtime.

Before they went their separate ways, Hannah watched Jonathan take their little lieutenant out to the edge of the campfire's light and release her butterflies. The nearly-translucent insects beat their greenish-blue wings madly as they were set free from their prison, straining to reach the stars, just like Jonathan had said. They spiraled away through the trees, and then her husband scooped up their little girl and took her in for bed.

"What wish did she make?" Hannah asked later as she snuggled next to Jon.

"Well, I was hoping for something sweet and profound, like us always being together, but she wished that none of the trees would eat us," he replied with a laugh. He ruffled Hannah's hair. "We have one dedicated kid."

"Mm, yes." And Hannah silenced him with a kiss.

Morning came, brightly sunny and far too soon after staying up late. A yummy smell wafted through the air, reminding Hannah of harvest apples and cinnamon pastry. When she stuck her head out of the tent, it was to see Lieutenant Shepard and her Mima picking wildflowers together. Well, in reality Hannah's mother was pointing to each flower and then her granddaughter would very carefully pinch it off at the stem. There were slight moments of hesitation, but as Hannah watched, her daughter got more confident with each plant that didn't bite her.

She dressed in the tent, and emerged just in time for her father to poke his head out of the nearest cabin window. "Hey, flapjacks are ready!" At that, Jonathan stirred behind her, and Hannah poked him.

"Come on sleepyhead. Our daughter's done more things than we have today."

"You know..." he said slowly, propping himself up on his elbows and gazing at his wife's face with a cheeky grin. "I am okay with that."

An hour later, Hannah and Jonathan finally got their breakfast of apple cinnamon pancakes. There was a note on the table from Rex and Shae-there was a large creek a mile and a half into the deep forest interior, with large natural clay deposits, some small, native fish, and plenty of calm water for wading. They had taken the 'lieutenant' on an unspecified mission, which amused Hannah. She was going to end up promoting her daughter to lieutenant commander before lunchtime, at this rate.

A post script at the bottom of the note mentioned that her parents had packed a picnic lunch for everyone, and when she and Jon were available, they could meet by the creek. After they set out, it occurred to Hannah that they might have a bit of a problem locating the rest of the family if the creek was too long, but when the scream of a little girl echoed through the trees, that mystery was abruptly solved.

She and Jonathan came charging through the underbrush, just in time to see Rex toss a lizard of some kind back into the water. The little lieutenant was hiding behind her Mima, and her face was white as a sheet.

"What happened?" Hannah asked breathlessly. "Is everyone okay?"

"The lieutenant found a green-backed salamander when she was looking for..." Rex consulted the list he'd made, "...a white ore deposit." He pointed to the collection of smooth, colored stones that had obviously been fished from the river. "We were doing some prospecting to help supply our ship."

Jonathan went over to his daughter and crouched down to hug her. "You know what? Daddy runs into strange creatures all the time when he's out on missions. You did the right thing by being careful. That's how a soldier stays safe."

"So I'm not a bad lieutenant?" the little girl asked, some color returning to her face.

"No," he assured her. "In fact, I don't think you're a lieutenant anymore. An act of common sense like that deserves a promotion." Jon glanced over his shoulder at Hannah.

"Right. Um...for collecting valuable flowers and other resources, as well as keeping your squad mates Poppa and Mima safe on this mission, I hereby promote you to...lieutenant commander," Hannah said, adopting her best nose-in-the-air at-attention pose. She glanced down and saw that her daughter was mimicking her, and couldn't help but laugh. "We'll put another star on your sleeve when we get back to the cabin."

The five of them spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon doing activities around the creek; wading up and down, skipping rocks, molding shapes and figures out of the natural clay that could be collected from the far bank. Jonathan even tried spearfishing, just because he knew he was no good and it amused everyone else to watch.

"Did you complete all of Poppa's mission objectives?" Hannah asked her daughter as they headed back to the cabin.

"Mmhm," 'Commander' Shepard said, her tired face lighting up. "I collected five kinds of ore, identified three animals, and skipped a w-r-rock twice." It had been easy to put her to bed that night; Hannah couldn't help but be proud that her space-born-and-raised daughter was handling the outdoors so well.

She should have known that a thought process like that would only lead to trouble.

"Hannah! Hannah, wake up!" the voice calling her name was just above a whisper, but the urgent tone was unmistakable. Hannah shook Jonathan's shoulder as she moved to the tent flap.

"Mom?" she asked quietly, peeking out. And then she froze. There were three fox-sized, dangerous-looking furry creatures, probably native, standing on the far side of the fire pit. Their coats were a mottled brown and green, giving them perfect camouflage in the underbrush, and right now they were eyeing Shae and her granddaughter almost contemplatively as they paced back and forth, attempting to close the distance.

Hannah took stock of the situation in a glance; Rex framed in the doorway of the cabin about twenty feet away from the animals, armed with nothing more than a broom. Shae had apparently been cooking something that smelled like bacon over the firepit, which must have been what attracted the creatures in the first place. The animals were thin, scrappy-looking and radiated desperation.

"My pistol's at the bottom of my bag," Jonathan muttered in her ear, and wordlessly, Hannah passed him the duffel. The click-click-whine of the gun being turned on didn't seem to faze the animals, and Hannah moved out of the way so he could line up a shot.

"Mom, move back towards the cabin, slowly," Hannah said quietly. Wordlessly, Shae reached for her granddaughter's hand and began to obey.

With a rending snarl, the animal on the left began a charge, not bothering to go around the fire to get to the people. Two shots screamed through the air and the creature fell over, killed cleanly. The other two had begun to charge at the same time, but Jonathan hadn't been able to aim fast enough... Hannah couldn't look away.

With two hands, the littlest Shepard picked up the frying pan full of bacon and hot grease and lobbed it directly into center animal's path. The splash pattern was nothing short of miraculous; right in the creature's four eyes. With a snarl and no small amount of yowling, it beat a hasty retreat back into the woods, crashing blindly as it went. The third, seeing it was now outnumbered, turned tail and ran after its wounded pack mate.

There was a breathless moment before Jonathan rallied. "That's my girl!"

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

_"And that's how my daughter got to be an admiral before she was ten,"_ Hannah said, smiling a bit wistfully at the camera. _ "Well, I hope that wasn't too boring. I don't know precisely how turians take their vacations, but now you know why, if asked, she'll say she's always outranked me."_ And then the rear admiral straightened, all business-like once more. _ "And if I haven't scared you out of your mind,__** and**__ you have better correspondence habits than my daughter...I hope to see a message from you sometime."_

The video ended, and Garrus found he was leaning almost relaxedly against the console behind him. He could imagine everything that had happened to the Shepard family on that trip, and wondered if that was why the commander didn't particularly care for animals. He grinned suddenly, mandibles lifting. He had his own story to relate...

His omnitool alerted him that he had new messages. Garrus sighed; for now, however, it was back to work.


	6. Day Five

_Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me). _

_Author's Note: Thank you to the couple of you who have left reviews saying you like this; it helps to know it's not way off base. I have to admit that I'm almost out of my depth when it comes to video games like this-but this is why we have wikis, and strategic save points to refer to. And possibly why I'm playing through ME3 again with a different save._

_Also, I feel it's fair for you to know that I'm using my first play-through as a reference for this, including my screw-ups. I didn't know to speak to Cortez on the Citadel to prevent his death later on in the game. Other choices may or may not be referenced in and out of the plot._

_And, I didn't know that the Extended Cut as well as the Citadel DLC counted as spoilers, so a belated Spoiler Alert! I just assumed that was how the game was run, because my husband had purchased the DLCs and beaten the game long before I played it._

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Day Five_

"Lieutenant, we've finally heard back from Meg Holloway," Traynor said to James when she ran into him in the mess hall at breakfast. "When you take Tali over, she says she'll be ready to go."

"Gotcha," James said, tossing back his last gulp of coffee. "Thanks, Radar."

Traynor rolled her eyes at him; she'd never quite taken to the nickname game as gracefully as Tali or Shepard. Even Garrus put up with it; he was really proud of his scars in a way that James didn't quite understand. The turian claimed they got him certain benefits, but hadn't elaborated. Maybe they'd driven Shepard crazy-he could respect that. It would explain why she teased him so much.

_Of course it's not that you started teasing her, and now she teases right back,_ he thought with a fair bit of amusement. He'd had a better night's sleep, probably due to being so exhausted the past couple of days. He was actually glad of the extra work Kaidan had assigned him; and now he'd have a former Alliance_ chica_ to boss around, all the way out to Gotha and back.

He washed up his dishes and went to the elevator, where he ran into Copeland.

"Hey Vega, did you hear?" Copeland asked, in a tone of voice implying that he was sharing a secret. "Alenko and Vakarian have a date tonight with the camera drone."

"And?" James asked. "They worked together back on the commander's first tour with the _Normandy._ They've gotta have some good stories. I mean, it wasn't all roses, based on what happened on the Citadel with the Council, but they're _amigos_ for the most part."

"Yeah, well I've got it on good authority from Daniels, who supposedly got it from Joker, that they're gonna tell about something that happened in a bar on the Citadel."

"Which bar?" James asked before he could stop himself. The elevator arrived and they both got on.

"You hear about the one that made Chora's Den look like a garden party?" Copeland asked. "Unchained?"

"No," Vega said. He hadn't been to the Citadel much before joining the _Normandy_, to be honest. "What's it like?"

"Let's just say it's the kind of bar you end up at _after_ all the other bars have thrown you out. Anyway, it's closed now. Has been for years. Joker said the owner decided to move to Omega or something after an...incident. Of course, he could be exaggerating; a lot of places closed after Sovereign."

"And he says this 'incident' involved Kaidan and Garrus?" James asked, a hint of suspicion creeping into his voice.

Copeland shrugged as the elevator doors parted. "Show up in the starboard lounge tonight around 1900 and decide for yourself." James hopped off into the shuttle bay and gave Copeland a nod. Well, if today turned out to need a little extra humor, he might just do that. It would be interesting to watch Scars and the major go at it.

Tali was already waiting for him, typing out some kind of message on her omnitool. "Good morning," she greeted. "I know I'm early, but I figured I better make last minute checks before you all leave."

"We're not going far, Tali," James assured her. "And we'll have full communications with the _Northern Star_, so relax. Besides, if they try anything we'll hold that refugee hostage until we get you back."

"Thanks...I think," Tali said dubiously as he swung himself into the cockpit to start pre-flight checks. "What a trade that would be."

"Well, we might have to sweeten the deal and offer them Daniels, too," James mused, his fingers flicking through the different interface screens. The engines started up with a hum as Tali hopped aboard and secured her bag.

"Donnelly wouldn't allow that," the quarian said.

"Well, until that _lolo_ gets his head screwed on straight and actually asks Daniels out, I don't see a problem," James said.

"You haven't talked to Donnelly much since Earth, have you?" Tali said in a knowing tone. James spun in his seat.

"Don't tell me that girl-chasing bachelor changed his tune?" he asked with surprise.

Tali nodded, and her voice clearly communicated her smug delight. "I guess seeing the end of the world flash before his eyes made Donnelly realize that some things weren't worth waiting for. And that some of the things already in his life need to be held close."

"Huh. And how's _Gabriela_ taking to all this?" James hadn't had to search very far for a nickname for Gabby; she always giggled when he pronounced the Spanish version of her name with full accent.

"I think her exact words were: 'it's about time'," Tali said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. "I've told Gabby that she and Donnelly need to tell Shepard that their relationship is...growing. Engineer Adams was going to put it in his message to her, but I think I interrupted him."

"Yeah, you've sure got everybody scrambling," James said, motioning for her to close the hatch. "Everything secure?"

"Roger," Tali replied, taking a seat as James maneuvered the shuttle into launch position.

"Joker, we're ready to go," he said over the comm.

_"Okay. Take care, Tali,"_ Joker's voice filtered to them.

"You too, Jeff," Tali said sincerely. "And please, think about what I said."

There was a pause, then a sigh. _ "I will._"

The ramp dropped and James piloted the Kodiak out into space, adjusting the controls which were slightly more accustomed to atmosphere than vacuum, in his opinion. He waited for a moment before prompting Tali: "What was that about, Sparks?"

Tali sighed. "I...encouraged him to send Shepard a message. Even just a short one. It was probably too soon, but...quarians tend to want to wrap up loose ends when they leave a ship."

"Give him time," James said. "And Liara's keeping an eye on him."

"I know," Tali replied. "Whatever happened up there, on the Crucible...we don't know what it was. All we see are the after effects, and...I wish I had time to learn more. To have deactivated-_killed_-an entire species like the geth...what was Shepard doing?"

James hadn't been letting that thought bother him, but on the other hand, the only geth he'd run into had been trying to murder him with no second thoughts. The 'heretics', as Legion had called them. "We can't go judging Lola now," he answered, turning in his seat to look at Tali. The bright crescents of her eyes gazed back at him. "Joker's treating this whole thing like she chose wrong, somehow. We don't even know that's the case; what if there was no choice, only a switch? Hit it, and the Reapers die. Don't, and they wipe out everything: you, me, and the new geth."

"Would their sense of self-preservation eventually have dictated they joined the Reapers anyway?" Tali mused quietly. Then she made a cast-away gesture, as if throwing the problem away from herself. "You're right, it's useless to speculate. What's done is done, and we can't look back."

"Can I get that in writing so I can show it to you the next time we have a conversation like this?" James joked as the shuttle came around and the _Norther Star_ loomed ahead.

"I'll try to remember," Tali promised dryly.

Fifteen minutes later, James hailed the Aysith Enterprises ship. _"Northern Star_, this is _Normandy's_ shuttle, requesting landing bay vector and clearance."

_"Affirmative, Lieutenant Vega. Transmitting."_

Shortly after that, the Kodiak settled into the designated cargo bay and James cut power to the engines. "Don't know how long it'll take to collect that refugee," he said to Tali, who hefted her bag and opened the hatch. "For all I know she's got fourteen crates of stuff for me to haul back."

"I haven't forgotten that the allowable amount of 'stuff' is still a footlocker...Lieutenant," said a woman's voice from up above him. James craned his neck until he found the source: a young woman was looking down at him from the second-story catwalk around the circumference of the cargo bay.

"You must be Holloway," he said with a friendly nod. "Lieutenant James Vega, but you can call me James."

The woman bent over and picked something up; a single bag. She descended the catwalk, passing Tali who was on her way up. "Admiral, Overseer Brayden has asked to meet with you as soon as you're settled," Holloway paused to say. "And...thanks, for helping us out." She didn't wait for acknowledgement before moving on down the stairs.

"Just call me Holloway," she said to James when she reached the deck. "And don't pin a rank on it; I'm former Alliance, not current." James looked her up and down; she was an entire head shorter than him, dressed in a greasy jumpsuit, and her black hair was pulled up somewhat messily. _ Heh, there's __**no way**__ I could confuse her for current,_ he thought to himself. _Wonder why she left._

Aloud, he said, "Well, Holloway, let's get back to the _Normandy._ We're pulling out in an hour." She nodded briskly and got into the shuttle without another word. James gave one last look around for Tali, but the quarian had already disappeared into the _Northern Star's_ interior.

"So," he said, settling himself into the pilot's chair. "How much do you know about shuttles?"

"Enough to know that this isn't the typical Kodiak model," Holloway replied. "This is the UT-47A. The cannons give it away." She stowed her bag and took a seat in the back. "You can test me all you want, Lieutenant. I'll probably fail most of your questions; I specialize in body work and...creative repair. As for Alliance protocols, well. I wasn't much of a soldier."

"Why'd you leave?" James asked, starting up the engines.

"Discharged for certain...reasons," Holloway replied evasively. "Medical, if it matters."

James let the subject drop after that. Whatever scars she carried, physical or otherwise, were her problem. Instead, he went for straight info. "In case our acting CO Major Alenko didn't cover it, your duties will be to maintain and pilot the shuttles on an as-needed basis. Also, the guy who had your job before worked on setting up our requisitions and maintaining the armory."

"You were friends." Holloway didn't make it a question. "Can I ask his name?"

"Cortez. Steve 'Esteban' Cortez. Not another man like him," James said shortly. "He died when we retook Earth."

Holloway was silent after that. James let the quiet hang in the air for several minutes, but when it was apparent that she wasn't going to speak unless spoken to, he gave up. _ It's going to be a very quiet shuttle bay from here on out,_ he thought to himself. _Esteban, man...I miss you._

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Kaidan was not prepared for the rush of noise that greeted him when the doors to the starboard lounge opened. His eyebrows went up; it was only 1850, and it looked as if a dozen of the crewmen had nothing better to do than lounge around, talking in groups...waiting.

Garrus was already by the camera drone, sticking out like a sore thumb in his armor. If anything, the turian seemed amused and chagrined by all the sideways glances and snickers he was getting.

"Are you deliberately trying to make me look like an idiot?" Kaidan muttered to him once he'd closed the distance enough so that he wouldn't be overheard.

"Relax, Alenko," Garrus advised. "I didn't tell anyone-and did you know that it's Shepard's mom who receives these messages? I have way more to lose here than you do."

"Well, _somebody_ knew what we were up to," Kaidan retorted.

Garrus thought about it. "There's only one other person who knew. The one who picked us up-what do you call it? 'Getaway driver'."

"Joker..." Kaidan growled. "He waits nearly three years and then can't keep quiet?" He groaned under his breath. "I can't believe this."

"Kaidan, look at it this way. If Liara were here, she'd say that this will provide a morale boost to the crew," Garrus said, sounding as if he were trying convince himself just as much as the _Normandy's_ acting CO. "At the very least, remember that we're not doing this for us."

The biotic took a deep breath and had to count to ten. When that wasn't enough, he tried twenty. He glanced around at all the people, just long enough for Vega to give him half a wave from where the brawny marine was sitting across the room next to Traynor.

_Well,_ Kaidan thought to himself, _if I'm going to destroy any pride at being the second human Specter, I guess I'll do it for these guys. _And that was part of it: he was human, like most of these crewmen. He had had a colorful career, and it made him who he was-it didn't come without rough patches, injuries, and stress. On the other hand, there had been laughs, parties, and good times, too.

He straightened, squared his shoulders, and tapped into the camera drone's controls. It responded obediently, bobbing up to an appropriate height to capture his face. Garrus got to his feet and tailed Kaidan to center stage in front of the large window, where Traynor and Liara had stood just a few days earlier to give them the state of the galaxy news.

Magically, the little conversations around the room abruptly died down. Kaidan exchanged a look with his co-speaker; Garrus just gestured for him to start them off.

"Hey, Commander," Kaidan said as the drone's light hit his face. "Well, I guess you could say we've got a special treat for you...a live audience." And here he chose to let the drone pan around the room. The crewmen caught on after a moment, and whooped and cheered.

"Hi Commander!"

"Yo, Lola!"

"Hey Shepard!"

When the camera got back to Kaidan, he went on, "Garrus and I have decided to break a three-year pact and tell you about something we're not...totally proud of."

"Speak for yourself," Garrus jumped in. "I'm at least proud of remembering all the words to the krogan battle song."

"After the _Normandy SR-1_ was destroyed, we were redirected through the Citadel on our way to our new assignments," Kaidan explained, ignoring the turian for the moment. "And...well, it was rough, you dying and all. Anyway, there was this bar-"

"And we had _not_ made plans to meet there," Garrus interjected. "Pure coincidence."

"And maybe I'd already had a few before ending up there," Kaidan said, rubbing the back of his neck ruefully. "Maybe more than a few."

"I was surprised you could still talk," Garrus said with a sideways look. "Humans don't hold their drinks like other species."

"Hey, I seem to remember a previous conversation where you said that there are two kinds of drunk turians: the kind who want to go prove their military prowess by shooting rocks, and the kind that think it's okay to go try and reach anywhere they can climb to and make a scene. I know which one you are," Kaidan shot back.

Garrus snorted and shook his head. "Needless to say, I was in Unchained first. Had been for a couple of hours; things were just starting to get fuzzy..."

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"Y'know, I never thought about it much...but why only siz-six fingers?" Garrus asked the bartender, studying his own left hand. "Makes it hard to count."

The human bartender, for his part, had given up talking to the inebriated plainclothes turian who had been making meaningless small talk for the last three drinks. It didn't bother Garrus much; sometimes he was the only intelligent person around to talk to.

"An'-and it's not because people are stupid," he said out loud. "I just think better'n-better than most of 'em. Y'know?" He set his glass down on the bar and studied it for a moment, riveted by how the thudding beat of the music made the liquid inside dance. He might have stayed that way for awhile, giving the bartender a needed break, but then a disturbance at the door caught his ear.

"Hey, there...this the place where you come when Chora's Den closes? That's what Shepard uzzed-used ta tell me..." Garrus turned and saw a familiar shock of unruly black hair on some human who was talking to a bouncer. A few of the other patrons in the sparsely-populated bar were also looking around.

"Alenko?"

Kaidan's semi-glazed expression brightened when he saw Garrus. "Heyyy strangerrr. Ya look smaller with no armor. Whachoo-what're you doing heeerrre?"

"Y'sound like a bad space pirate, Alenko. C'mon, let's get a table." Garrus managed to stand up; his knees weren't totally wobbly yet, which meant he had at least five more drinks to go before he'd definitely have to take a skycab to his rental apartment.

Kaidan managed to stagger about fifty feet to a table in the corner, near an asari dancer who was doing some...stretches in between routines. Both of them watched for a minute, before Kaidan snagged a passing server and ordered another drink. The server took his cred chit and vanished.

"Ssso, you din't-didn't answer. What're you doing?" Kaidan said as steadily as he could manage.

"What else? I'm gonna fill that black hole Shepard's left me with using turian brandy," Garrus replied. He waited for the mention of her name to sting, but the brandy was doing it's job. He just felt...floaty.

"Helluva thing...can't believe she's really...gone." Even though humans didn't have the same subvocal warnings as turians, Garrus could tell that Kaidan had probably already done the human version of mourning and cried it out, probably at the first bar he'd visited.

"Yeah, you liked her," Garrus said without thinking about how it sounded. "You guys've been together for a long time." He tossed back the rest of his current glass of brandy and signaled for another.

"Welllll, not like_ that,"_ Kaidan said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I's-it's just professionalll. _Was._ Was professional." He sipped his newly-arrived beer and sighed.

"Yeah. Everybody knew you...what do humans say? 'Digged her'? Something about digging soup..."

"Think you mean chili," Kaidan corrected with another swig of beer. "Never liked chili, though. Not sure what the commander was made of but it wasn't chili. Fun word, though: chili."

"Hm. Commander Shepard's not made of chili. I think I knew that," Garrus replied solemnly. "If she'd been a turian, the saying would be 'you wanted to peel her_ kassava'_.

Kaidan stared at Garrus for a long minute. "Wow. Turians are _dirty_. Did the commander know about you and your _kass_-whatever?"

The turian looked at him, as thoroughly startled as he could be considering how drunk he was. "It's a saying, Kaidan. Never said **_I_** wanted to peel anything."

"Uh huh. You got to go act all knight-in-turian-armor on Amaterasu, saving her and Liara from a fate worse than death. Tell me you don't have feelin's for her, Vakarian." Kaidan pinned him with an accusing glare. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed, even in the dim, strobing lights of the bar.

Garrus laughed. "When was the last time you saw a human-turian couple, Alenko? It just doesn't happen."

"Ya don't seem like the type to let it hold you back," Kaidan retorted.

"I'm not, but...I don't. Even you couldn't be that blind. I liked Shepard as the good commander she was: kicking butt, shutting down geth, and mercs...pirates...yeah." Garrus shrugged. "Don't blame me for you messing up your chances."

Something inside Kaidan snapped-he could almost hear the sound and he lunged for the turian across the table. Garrus, like any good former C-Sec officer, reacted by leaning to the left just enough that Kaidan's wild energy took him across the table-right into the asari dancer who was thoroughly wrapped around her pole.

"Oof-hey!" she yelped as Kaidan used her as a brace to get back on his feet. She ducked away from him and ran for it. The other customers in the bar suddenly decided to make themselves scarce.

"What, did you think she was Liara or something?" Garrus teased, leaning back in his chair and talking over his shoulder. "I mean, you might be blind, but at least Liara wears more."

With a wordless roar, Kaidan thrust out his hand and a dangerous indigo energy field built up around him. Garrus barely had time for a muttered curse before he flipped the table and ducked behind it. Kaidan's throw instead caught the first batarian security officer who came through the door from a back room.

"Apparently your new asari called her friends," Garrus called to Kaidan. He shook his head in an attempt to keep the world in focus. He counted six-no, eight batarians who were fanning out to contain the situation. _Shoulda worn the armor,_ he thought with a twinge of humor.

"No friends of mine," Kaidan spat back. "Maybe old C-Sec buddies of yours!" He tried to hit them with a barrier, but his aim was terrible. Mostly due to his lack of balance, Garrus thought as the human wove unsteadily for a moment.

"Nope. But they do look kinda like Charn and his guys," Garrus said thoughtfully. "And I don't like them."

"Charn? You mean that dirty sonofa-_aaargh!"_ Kaidan didn't need any more convincing as he caught two of them in stasis.

"Nope, don't like them at all," Garrus repeated, standing from cover and hefting his chair.

"You want to leave, now," the lead batarian said as he gestured some of his men forward.

"No, I don't." Garrus threw his chair at the batarian on his left and then charged. The hard plated spikes on top of his head struck the batarian squarely in the midsection, and he went down with a wheezy moan. "That's for Shepard!"

Two batarians grabbed him, one on each arm, and Garrus used his weight to his advantage, going momentarily limp so that the batarians had to struggle to keep hold of him. Also, it gave him a chance to duck Kaidan's next biotic throw. Then he twisted, swept the batarian on his left's feet out from under him, and then threw the one on his right over his shoulder on top of the first.

Garrus left them in a groaning pile and charged the next batarian. "And this one's in honor of Wrex, who taught me all I know!" he shouted just before impact. The bar hazed out of focus for a minute, but before the turian could collect himself three more of them attempted to tackle him to the ground.

"This one's for Tali!" Kaidan shouted, putting one of batarian in stasis. "And for those civilians back on Amaterasu!" He closed the distance and grabbed another one of the batarians on top of Garrus, dealing him a hefty blow to the side of the head, where the batarians sensitive auditory organs were located.

"Wish you could have been there when Wrex and I took all those batarians down," Garrus panted, giving the last batarian a couple of punches to the face. When his opponent went down, he added a few kicks to the midriff for good measure. A nostalgic grin spread his mandibles. "And Wrex wouldn't shut up about it, either. He was singing krogan battle songs all the way back to the Citadel."

"No way," Kaidan said, stomping on another batarian to make sure he stayed down. "What do krogan even sing _about?"_

"That's the kinda thing you can't explain, so I'll show you!" Garrus looked around for inspiration, and his eyes lit on the neon sign for the bar, featuring blue chain links and some lurid pink strobe lighting. He hopped up onto the bar, then jumped to the shelving behind it, where he found the maintenance ladder. He'd been a sniper too long to not know the highest point in nearly every location on the Citadel.

Feet planted in a wide stance atop the sign, Garrus cleared his throat, threw his arms apart, and began to bellow:

_Forth to the battle, on to the fight,_

_Crafty as the pyjak in his flight!_

_Let not the dust our pathway close,_

_Till we overthrow our many foes._

_Strong as the bloody tide,_

_Rushing down the mountainside;_

_Ready your weapons, dagger and spear,_

_Kalros take us if we fail here._

_Winds that float over us,_

_Make our enemies quail,_

_Never shall their coward bands prevail!_

_Morning shall see us well and free,_

_Never beaten shall true krogan be._

_Now our arms with conquest bless,_

_All our bitter wrongs redress;_

_Strike the hammer! Awake the cry!_

_Tuchanka's sons fear not to die._

At that precise moment, four of 'Tuchanka's sons' came out from some other back room and witnessed the very drunk turian butchering one of their native songs. At first, they were frozen in confusion or possibly chagrin at the display, and that was all that saved Garrus, who respected the krogan enough to know that he had little to no chance against a squad of them in hand-to-hand combat. They started to advance on the two men who had just mown through their batarian coworkers.

"Garrus-!" Kaidan yelled, apparently noticing the same thing. He brought up his omnitool and tried patching through a message while throwing up a barrier around himself.

_"What in the-Kaidan, do you know what time it is?"_ Joker's tinny voice spoke up.

"We need an extraction, Joker. Now!" Kaidan said, sounding commanding despite the fact that he was using a dance pole to hold himself up.

_"An extraction...are you crazy? You're just drunk-calling me, aren't you?"_

"He's not kidding!" Garrus shouted, leaping from the shelves behind the bar to the bar itself. "We've been compromised!"

_"Garrus? What are you-ow! I think I broke my femur...forget the pants. This had better be__** important**__,"_ Joker grumbled. _"Where are you?"_

"We're at-" Garrus' answer was interrupted by the unholy sound of his left calf spur catching on the edge of the bar when he jumped to the floor. He bit down on a keening cry of pain as he collapsed in an ungainly pile, his entire left leg a mass of tingling nerves and no productive movement.

Kaidan muttered an oath and stretched out his hand.

Garrus' eyes widened. "Alenko, don't you dare!" he warned but the biotic ignored him and lifted anyway.

"Unchained, we're at the bar called Unchained!" Kaidan shouted. "Garrus you're gonna want to tuck your head down."

"What, why would-" The question was cut off when Kaidan threw him towards the door. Thankfully, Garrus' hard exoskeletal back plating protected him from the impact against the doorframe, for the most part. He managed to get his right leg under himself and started the process of shaking feeling back into his left.

Kaidan was now attempting to run after him, but the human was still far too unbalanced to make it more than a hundred feet before falling over. The krogan had slowed their advance when Kaidan put two of them in a stasis field, and as it was clear the enemy was retreating, didn't appear to want to cause more property damage by inciting the crazy, drunk biotic into hurling more stuff around the room.

"Y'know, I saw this evening ending differently," Garrus said as Kaidan finally reached him. They tried to support each other as they beat as hasty a retreat as they could manage under the circumstances.

"Really? I didn't," Kaidan confessed. "The landing pad's left. To the left." By the time they managed to hobble their way there, a black skycar was already waiting.

Joker popped the hatch and the two of them tumbled inside, a hopeless mess of arms and legs. The pilot didn't even wait for the doors to close before shouting at them. "You'd better have a good explanation as to why I'm down here at two fourteen in the freaking morning!"

Garrus managed to drag himself into a seat, rubbing his throbbing leg while trying to catch his breath. "I, um..."

"It's sorta, well..." Kaidan seemed to lack the strength to move himself off of the floor. With the biotic display he'd just pulled, he was probably going to pass out when the adrenaline wore off.

"Bar fight," Garrus simply settled on. "Got in a fight. Over Amaterasu."

"There were batarians," Kaidan added, as if it explained everything.

Joker didn't take his eyes off the horizon as he flew through the darkness before dawn. "Are you gonna pay me to keep this quiet for you?"

"With what? Asari lap dances?" Garrus retorted.

"Joker, what if we just owe you one?" Kaidan said a little plaintively.

The pilot sighed, but then he appeared to think it over. "You know...someday I might need help moving dead bodies or something. If that day comes, you're going to be the ones I call. You got it?"

Kaidan looked at Garrus; they nodded. "Got it."

"Now swear you won't ever tell anyone this ever happened," Garrus added.

"What, like a pact? As long as it includes you two never being allowed to drink together ever again, then fine. I'll swear a blood oath or whatever you want," Joker replied.

"Done."

"Agreed."

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"So there you go. Now you know the whole story," Kaidan said, with a sideways look at Garrus, who nodded in confirmation.

"Apparently, friends don't let friends drink and discuss Commander Shepard's love life. Unless you've got Joker as your getaway driver."

Their audience burst into clapping and cheering as the camera drone panned around one last time before Kaidan shut it off. He could feel his face was red with embarrassment, and Garrus looked equally humiliated.

But, there was only one thing to do after that kind of applause: they took a bow.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

_Post Script: The credit for inspiration for the krogan battle song goes to Lesley Nelson-Burns and the original Welsh song titled 'Rhyvelgyrch Cadpen Morgan' or 'Forth to Battle'. _


	7. Day Six

_Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me). _

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Day Six_

"Major, we're entering orbit over Gotha," Joker reported over the comm.

_"Thanks, Joker. Pass the word to Vega and Traynor. I'll be up in a minute,"_ Kaidan replied.

The flight lieutenant paged the requested crewmen, and true to his word, Kaidan was standing behind his chair before Joker had finished his message to James.

"Any contacts on the surface?" the major asked him. It took almost ten seconds before Joker realized that he was supposed to answer, and not... Not for the first time today, he pushed the thought out of his mind.

"Uh, yes. The C Team ships are still docked, looks like to a couple of the geth mining platforms," Joker replied after a moment. "Both platforms seem to have communications; I'll try raising them."

It took a few minutes before a response came back.

_"I read you, Normandy. Heard you were showing up to help out,"_ a man's disembodied voice came back. _ "My name's Thomas. Should have the C Team all packed to the gills in a couple more hours, then we'll start with you. In the meantime, if you've got able-bodied crew twiddling their thumbs..."_

"This is Major Alenko; if you'll give us coordinates we'll start bringing personnel in our shuttle," Kaidan said from over Joker's left shoulder. "Lieutenant James Vega is the one in charge of coordinating this mining endeavor, so we'll send him in the first wave, along with any of our tech specialists we didn't leave to help with relay repairs."

_That's a short list,_ Joker thought. _Seems like we left everybody but Adams at the relay._ He tried not to think about Tali's parting words to him, and forced himself to remain in the present. "Coordinates received, Major," he said to Kaidan. "Sending them to the shuttle."

_"Thanks, Major. Thomas out."_

"Okay, Joker. Hold us close to those platforms for now; once we drop our people off, we're going to try some prospecting of our own," Kaidan said. "Warn...Adams to prep some probes." He hesitated briefly, but Joker pretended he hadn't noticed.

"On it, sir."

His fingers flew across the screens in front of him, cutting the _Normandy's_ thrusters back as requested, allowing the ship to gently float towards the designated 'parking zone' over what appeared to be the primary mining platform. That done, he began to sort through sensor data and refine the processes for ore detection. At one time, it had been a simple subroutine that Commander Shepard had suggested be added to the new _Normandy SR-2_ to reduce all the driving around in the Mako, hoping to stumble upon raw deposits. EDI had been the one to put it into action, back when she'd been a chained AI, and since then had handled all probe telemetry and sensor data reports.

_And there it is again,_ Joker thought closing his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, he looked straight ahead, and not at the empty chair behind and to his right. The first day back in the pilot's chair, he'd caught flashes of silver out of the corner of his eye, and would turn only to see a panel glinting as stars passed by overhead. Now he knew better than to keep looking; the robot body EDI had used for her mobile platform was down in the AI core, where it would remain until Joker could do something about it.

After learning about Tiptree, he'd thought that maybe...EDI would be the one thing that didn't leave him. She was unchanging, couldn't get older, wouldn't show her age. She would be a constant in the universe. In _his_ universe.

But he'd been wrong; her blue box was nonfunctional, and without a complete copy of her code to put back into that specific blue box, code which she of course had modified herself and had been very protective of, there was nothing to be done. It was all scattered fragments and strings of gibberish. Even if they'd had a copy to move to a different box, it would have resulted in a different personality. It might call itself EDI, but would she be the AI _he_ knew?

_Why didn't you trust anyone, EDI?_ he thought. _Why didn't you trust any of us enough to let us make a back up in case this happened?_

Joker didn't know. He didn't even know if EDI understood the concept of trust, or at least the way humans perceived it. And...it hurt to think that she hadn't trusted_ him._

He might have continued with that unpleasant line of thinking, hadn't a message from Liara popped up on his console. The asari had been trying to tone down her making a nuisance of herself, but in reality Joker appreciated her attention. He knew he was giving off bad vibes, and the crew was tiptoeing around him as a result of it. Liara just seemed wilfully ignorant of his desire to have a bad attitude, and sent him messages or found reasons to run into him three or four times a day.

"Hey Liara," he said, pushing his hat back a little. "What's up?"

_"I just got a message I think you'll want to see,"_ Liara said, sounding happier than she had in awhile. _ "Can you take a break and come down here?"_

Joker nearly groaned; he didn't want to get up if he didn't have to, and this was probably all a ploy to get him to eat lunch. "Can it wait?"

Liara's tone turned firm. _"We're in a parked position over a planet, using the shuttle to make multiple trips for at least the next two hours. Get. Down. Here."_

At that, he at least managed a chuckle. "Yes ma'am."

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"Okay, Holloway, this is an easy one," Vega said to his trainee. He was sitting in the copilot seat, watching as Holloway checked her pre-flight screens. "Just to the platform and back with a nice, easy navpoint."

Holloway, for her part, didn't seem to want to deign him with a reply. "Yes, Lieutenant," she said flatly, clearing a couple of the screens and powering up the engines.

The more he tried to talk to Holloway, the less James was sure he wanted to. Yeah, she did good bodywork, just like she said, but she always seemed snippy, using just enough words to get by. _ Sure wasn't your winning personality that made the Alliance recruit you,_ he thought to himself. When asked about her service history, she replied shortly that she had been recruited for her biotic ability as soon as she'd turned eighteen. She'd been medically discharged in 2184, less than three years into her career.

James shook his head; rough hand to be dealt, but then, everybody right now had their own personal battles to fight. "You guys ready back there?" he said loudly to the dozen crewman in the back.

"Yes sir!" Copeland said. "Even though I think we didn't really need to strap in."

James shrugged. "Can't be too careful with the _chica nueva_ driving," he said over his shoulder. Holloway didn't even bother with a reply.

"You gonna let him talk to you like that?" Ellie Young, one of the command deck technicians asked Holloway.

"I'm just an FNG," Holloway replied levelly. "He can talk to me however he wants. Hatch closed?"

"Yes," Copeland reported. "Seriously-it's Holloway, right?-don't let Mr. Bigshot here get the best of you. He's a horrible teaser."

Holloway didn't reply as she punched up the navigation screen. James kept an eye on her and spoke instead. "Don't distract my trainee when she's driving, Copeland."

The_ Normandy_ shuttle zipped out of the shuttle bay with no problem, then dropped into a slow, parabolic descent toward the designated mining platform. There was almost a collective indrawn breath as Holloway set the Kodiak down with only a few moderate thumps.

"Okay, helmets secure, and all you_ lolos_ out!" James yelled with a wave of his arm. "You gonna be okay with the rest of the runs?" he asked the shuttle pilot, who was taking a few deep breaths and going back over her thruster logs as if to pinpoint where exactly she'd gone bumpy on the final approach.

"Yes, Lieutenant," she said with a curt nod as he put his own helmet on. Holloway slipped a breather mask on and then Copeland popped the hatch.

"Remember, the geth don't need air, water, or _banos_, so we'll get all that sorted out when we reach the command center here," James told the crewmen as they jumped to the angular, alien-looking platform. He took a quick look around, and waved at one of the Aysith workers who motioned for the _Normandy_ crew to follow.

Holloway began powering up the engines as James stuck his head back inside the shuttle. "Hey, Holloway?" She turned. "It takes awhile. It'll get easier."

"If you say so, Lieutenant." And she got up and closed the hatch in his face. James shook his head, turned away, and jogged after the crewman, the wash from the shuttle's engines buffeting the back of his suit.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Doctor Karin Chakwas was having a stare down with the camera drone. It had already erased her first recording attempt, apparently, and she wasn't sure it was taking her second try, either. She sighed and finally erased that one, too.

"All right," she said aloud to the empty lounge, fluffing her platinum hair and then patting it down again. "You know what they say about third times..." She switched on her omnitool and adjusted the settings for the drone once more.

"Hello, Commander. I'm afraid I've had a bit of trouble with the camera drone, so if this message is...piecemeal, I apologize. I thought, however, you'd like to hear the story of how your mother and I met for the first time."

Chakwas directed her best troublemaking look at the camera. "Oh yes, Hannah. It's time she knew the truth, don't you think?"

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

It was Valentine's Day, and the young, fresh Dr. Karin Chakwas was without a date. In previous years, she had hardly noticed the event, since she'd had her nose to the grindstone in medical school. But that was all behind her now, and she was trying her hand at being a general practitioner. She'd always had an attraction to the Alliance, and was lucky enough to have discovered an office looking to hire a replacement doctor at the brand-new Alliance Academy Station in orbit over Mars. She spent her days processing and vaccinating new recruits, keeping accurate files and performing routine screenings. She'd tried the whole Earthside general practitioner stint for the whole of six months before she realized it wasn't for her.

The discovery of the strange, alien spacecraft buried on Mars barely three years prior had awoken something in her; a realization that humanity was going to have to change its views very quickly, and very soon. And then a year later, the further wonder that was the Charon 'transit station' had been activated, proving further that there was an entire galaxy out there to be explored, thanks to the remnants of this lost prothean civilization.

And Karin Chakwas wasn't sure how or even why, but she wanted to be a part of it. There were plenty of Chakwas family members who had made names for themselves in the medical field, with new techniques, excellent research, and modern breakthroughs that could save hundreds of lives. But not one of them had gone into space. Not one of them had met an alien, or even considered going beyond the comforts of the local cluster.

Karen Chakwas was different. After her duty shifts, she liked to rub shoulders with the cadets on the station. It was fun to listen to their horror stories about their least favorite instructors, or the training they were undergoing in a particular field. She'd even made a couple of friends among the second- and third-year cadets; she frequented the same tea establishment around the same time every morning and had seen a few of them more than once. They were merely acquaintances, of course, but it made Karin's mornings a little less lonely.

But back to the Valentine's Day of 2151, according to the original Earth calendar. In truth, she almost would have forgotten it, hadn't the tea shop put up paper decorations and one annoying flying cupid VI that seemed trained to scatter holographic confetti on anybody who went in or out of the door.

"Hey Karin!" Jacques greeted her when she got to work. "Full roster today, but we'll be closing an hour early, so it's only to be expected." He handed her a datapad with her appointments listed.

"An hour early?"

Jacques nodded. "Yeah, most of the cadets are being given liberty for the weekend. It's the end of a semester."

"Oh." Karin shrugged. "Well, at least it'll be nice to have the extra time..."

She'd put it out of her mind then, in a day full of the usual: exams, consults, even a few prescription approvals for instructional staff who were taking leave thanks to the academic calendar break. She deflected a couple of questions during lunch about what her Valentine's Day plans were for the evening, until her nurse Mona wouldn't accept her vague answers.

"Girl, you need to go fishing!" she declared when Karin at last admitted that she had no romantic plans. "Grab yourself a fishing pole and some bait and get out there! Find a nice, friendly bar and make some friends." Her warm brown eyes danced with laughter. "There's plenty of young cadets to choose from; all you have to do is pick the age, the weight, and the size!"

"Mona, it's okay if I don't want to complicate my new medical profession with a transient love affair," Karin protested. "Besides..." she hedged, "I have some important reading I need to catch up on."

Mona _tsked_ and had fixed her with a skeptical gaze. "Girl, there's something wrong with you!"

At the time, Karin had been emphatically sure that she was just going to go home, whip up a salad for dinner, and perhaps catch up on a couple of the medical journals she'd left languishing on her coffee table. But then, Karin Chakwas had never been one to back down from a challenge. She'd glanced at the journals, then glanced at her closet. _I must have __**something**__ in there that doesn't label me as an out-of-touch med student,_ she mused.

Then there was the question of 'bait'. Some girls would take a book with a popular title, or maybe a thermal clip to fiddle around with. Karin didn't really consider herself an expert on either, so she settled for something that might at least earn her some friendly, amused conversation: a couple of her vintage _Sky Pirates_ comic books.

Forty-five minutes later saw her sitting relaxedly at a table on the edge of a food court just inside the Alliance Naval Academy's side checkpoint. She had a deliciously decadent double-chocolate milkshake and was reacquainting herself with the devilish Captain Mac Runn and his crew of creative miscreants, all the way from his loyal first officer Zaore to the quirky engineer Keli.

"Sure you don't want something stronger than that?" a female voice interrupted her thoughts. Karin looked up in some surprise to see a young woman, clearly a cadet by her tags, smiling at her. "You might need it, to get up enough nerve to be chatty with these guys." She gestured around her at the teeming crowds of young men and women going to get dinner, go out for their Valentine's dates, or find some sort of entertainment in general.

"Well, I thought I'd start with dessert before drinks," Karin said, leaning back and studying her visitor.

"I admire your choice of bait, though," the young woman said. "Classic comic that, although I always considered it to be more of a graphic novel. Personally, though..." She pulled a book out from under her arm. "I find everybody's heard of this."

_"'War of the Worlds'," _Karin read aloud. "Can't say I remember enough of that to use it for bait."

"Really? That's a shame." The cadet pulled out a chair and sat down. "I guarantee Captain Mac there's a model of dashing bravado, good gunslinging, and witty one-liners, but this," and she tapped the cover of her book, "this is meant to stand the test of time. You should try listening to the audio files from the original radio broadcasting-that'll give you some perspective on meeting aliens."

Karin paused. "Before we go any farther...I'm Karin Chakwas."

"Hannah Scott," the young woman identified herself. "And it's nice to find a fellow fisherwoman on a day like today." She settled back into her chair and sighed. "Been a long semester. And the only bright star in it was the cute visiting marine instructor." Hannah gave Karin a knowing smile. "He's probably got some poor lonely wife at home on Earth, but a cadet can dream, right? He was about the only thing that made the planetary reconnaissance field technique lectures bearable."

"Does this marine have a name? Or only good looks?" Karin teased Hannah.

"Lieutenant Jonathan Shepard," Hannah clarified, picking up one of the other _Sky Pirates_ volumes and leafing through it slowly. "He was in the team that originally discovered the alien outpost on Mars."

"Really? Sounds like he had some interesting stories," Karin said thoughtfully.

"Oh, it might sound glamorous and adventurous," Hannah warned, "but after so many hours of theoretical diagrams and squad approach schematics my brain started to numb up."

"I've thought of enlisting, but I was rather hoping for some glamour and excitement," Karin admitted with a rueful smile. "I thought I'd better see what the new 'Systems Alliance' stood for before joining up...Hannah? What's wrong?" she asked, as Hannah had suddenly turned rather pink in the face and was trying not to stare at something to Karin's left.

She turned, and saw a fairly handsome young man in an Alliance officer's uniform. He was clearly absorbed in answering a message on his omnitool, so Karin took a chance and murmured, "Is that your 'cute' lieutenant?"

"Yeah," Hannah muttered back. "Probably on the omnitool with his wife."

"That's his mother," Karin said with certainty, even though she couldn't really tell one way or the other. "I could try to bring him over, if you'd like."

"Why don't you just say 'here fishy, fishy' while you're at it?" Hannah asked in a mortified whisper.

"What, all that talk and no follow through? I hope you're not in command training," Karin said. She folded her comic book and set it down next to her half-empty milkshake glass. With a wink, she started to get up, but needn't have bothered as the man in question came toward the table. Somehow, Hannah managed to keep her blush from darkening any further.

"I thought I recognized those comics," Jonathan Shepard said. "I used to be a huge Captain Mac fan back in the day."

"Really? Hannah was just telling me about them," Karin improvised. "I'm more of a novel reader, myself." And she slid Hannah's book across the table to herself before the cadet could object.

"Oh yes. I remember you-Scott, isn't it?" Jonathan asked Hannah.

Karen bumped Hannah's knee under the table when it appeared that her new acquaintance had completely frozen in the spotlight.

"Yes sir!" she answered hastily, belatedly remembering to jump up and salute. Jonathan returned the salute, clearly amused.

"Sit down, Scott."

_Before you hurt yourself,_ Karin thought with a grin. "Hannah tells me you're one of the people that was on Mars for the big discovery. Tell me, how do you see all this alien technology affecting us in the long-term?"

Jonathan looked at her civilian clothing and cocked his head to one side. "Just a visitor, miss...?

"Doctor, actually. Karin Chakwas; I work in the clinic on base. With all the new recruits, the clinic was taking any doctor who wanted to come all the way out here. I wanted to know more about what the Alliance plans to do with all this new responsibility before I throw all my medical school training into the military by enlisting." Karin sat forward and gestured to the empty seat between her and Hannah, who was still staring a bit starry-eyed at the lieutenant.

Jonathan hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and seated himself. Karin thought Hannah couldn't possibly sit up any straighter, but somehow the young woman managed it; her back so ramrod-straight it hurt to look at her. "It's only a matter of time before the Alliance exploration teams find the aliens that left behind that technology. And I'm willing to bet that if there are more transit stations out there, some of them have to lead to other worlds with new aliens."

"Humanity's going to keep expanding," Hannah added suddenly, apparently recovered from her brief moment of shy speechlessness. "My father always said that people like a challenge; what are these stations if not challenging us to see what's out there? He's always supported expansion efforts; in fact, his support of the Alliance is why the New Salem colony on Mars accepted the proposed Alliance government."

"Your father is Rex Scott?" Jonathan asked, surprised.

"Sure is. How do _you_ know him?"

"Well, that's a funny story. See..."

Karin listened for a few more minutes, long enough to finish her milkshake. When it was apparent she was no longer needed, she took out a pencil, carefully opened to the back cover of Hannah's book, and scribbled her contact information along with a quick note. _Let me know how it turns out. Best wishes! - Fellow Fisherwoman. _

And then, like Captain Mac at his finest, Karin Chakwas excused herself and vanished into the crowd.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"And _that_, Commander, is how I set up your parents," Karin Chakwas said to the camera drone. "Don't ever let you mother tell you otherwise." She moved to switch off the drone, but then had a thought. "Oh, and Hannah, if you still have those comic books, you can keep them, as a...wish for future good luck."

With that, Dr. Karin Chakwas stood, turned off the camera, and sent her message.


	8. Day Seven

_Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me). _

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Day Seven_

Hannah Shepard found herself standing outside her daughter's locked hospital room, her duffel shoved messily into her arms and looking somewhat bewildered.

After a moment, she found her voice. "You saw that, right?" she asked the guard on the left-hand side of the door.

He straightened in place and appeared to choose his words carefully. "If you mean did I see the leader of Tuchanka forcibly eject you from the room once he'd found out you hadn't left it in six days, then...yes ma'am. I believe I did."

"Uh huh," Hannah said slowly, turning to look at the door. She genuinely wasn't sure what to do; as a planetary leader, she was sure Wrex had so much diplomatic immunity that she couldn't just order him removed without consequences. Not that she had any intention of using her Alliance authority that way...or that in her exhausted presence of mind she could piece enough of an objection together.

"Admiral?" Somewhat blearily, Hannah looked around and saw a face she thought she recognized. Unfortunately, the woman's name didn't come to mind as quickly as she'd hoped.

"I'm Kahlee. Kahlee Sanders. I was..." the woman stopped and swallowed hard.

"Admiral Anderson's friend," Hannah said gently, her memory finally catching up. "I'm...I understand what you're going through." She took Kahlee's outstretched hand and instead of shaking it, squeezed it in empathy. "I apologize if I seem...distracted."

"Who could blame you?" Kahlee asked with a small, mirthless laugh. "I imagine that if the news has nothing positive to say about the galaxy's most heroic commander, then it must be pretty awful." Her chin dropped for a moment and she looked at the floor, perhaps recalling the first report she'd had of Anderson when rescue teams moved in.

"It...it is hard, especially at first," Hannah acknowledged. But then she strove for a bit of levity, lightening her tone. "And to make things worse, the krogan clan leader has evicted me from the immediate premises." She glared somewhat ineffectually over her shoulder at the two guards by the door, who were decidedly not making eye contact.

Kahlee appeared to bolster her emotions; she regarded Hannah at arm's length and looked her up and down. "Well, he was right," she said, straightening and summoning up a small, but genuine smile. "Come on, I know my way around this section of the ship pretty well. A couple of my students from Grissom Academy have been hospitalized here; a brother and sister, and I've been running around for them the last couple of days; growing biotics and all." And with that, she took Hannah by the elbow and started off down the hall.

The rear admiral allowed herself to be towed along, everything moving just a little too fast for her brain to keep up.

"I've been using the crew quarters, so we'll stop there. You can shower as long as you like, change your clothes, and then let's get a hot lunch from the cafeteria. And then we might get crazy and I'll brew us some jasmine tea." And thus Hannah Shepard was politely dragged away.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Wrex wasn't much for bedside vigils, and he didn't put much stock in them. However, he had some...orders...in the form of a message Bakara had sent him when he'd told her about Shepard's whereabouts and his intention of visiting.

_"You generally have all the sensitivity of a rock, Wrex. You are dealing with females, and you will respect them and their pain. The Shepards may be strong females, like krogan, but remember the generations of suffering we ourselves have come through to be in this moment of triumph for krogan everywhere. Do not be blunt, do not be rude. Remember this well: be a gentleman. Give my deepest wishes to the commander, and my hope to her mother."_

Wrex had snorted and laughed at the very idea-he was always a gentleman. As long as gentlemen carried guns and never took no for an answer. It had taken him longer than he'd thought to make time in his busy schedule to catch a transport up to the_ Zuckerkandl._ What with trying to evacuate the krogan warriors with the greatest injuries, regrouping the remaining healthy survivors, and ensuring that his people were making a good first impression in the post-war atmosphere, among other things. He'd already consulted with Primarch Victus several times for joint operations in searching large cities for survivors, and the further he buried himself in work, the harder it was to remember other obligations.

It was Bakara's message that had prompted him to finally get his tail in gear; if she found out that he'd made a promise to his bond-sister's mother and hadn't gone through with it...well, Wrex didn't want to know how long he could sit still for one of Bakara's speeches about loyalty.

He'd been relatively unhindered in his attempt to find Shepard's room; even the guards outside looked appropriately intimidated when he walked up, still bristling with armor and weapons. One of them had been very quick to contact Admiral Shepard, who it turned out was already on her way to the door.

"Admiral," Wrex said in greeting.

"Urdnot Wrex, please call me Hannah," the thin human woman said. She motioned for him to follow her inside, and he took in the austere, sterile surroundings at a glance. He hadn't had much reason to spend time in Alliance hospitals, and the entire place smelled far too clean for Wrex's liking. What was the world without burning fires among piles of rubble and the dust of fallen walls choking the air?

"Today's been her best day so far," Hannah said to him, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears. "The doctors' newest reports say that she'll have full control of her hands. They're not sure about her right arm yet; the worst case scenario is it will take more extensive cybernetic replacement...the best is she'll need physical therapy. Everything else is...touch and go, for the moment."

Wrex cast an appraising eye over Hannah Shepard. She looked worse than Shepard had when he'd seen her on the Citadel during the confrontation with her clone. That had been right before the final move on Earth, when the commander had been under the greatest stress of her entire life. Not that Shepard had ever told Wrex as much; he'd overheard Joker saying something about it to EDI.

From the looks of it, the human woman had been living out of her duffel and had likely never ventured out of this room from the instant she'd arrived. If she'd been a krogan, Wrex would have..._huh. What would I do?_ he asked himself. It was a female's job to reason with other females. He would have sent Bakara to talk with Hannah.

In Bakara's absence, however, he tried to think of what the shaman would say, in all her wisdom. After a few fruitless seconds of that, Wrex fell back on her message. "My mate Bakara sends her deepest wishes for Shepard's recovery, and her hope for you. She worries that I won't be a...gentleman...while I'm here."

Hannah grinned at him rather suddenly, and Wrex was forcibly reminded of how Shepard had looked when he'd presented her with what the humans called a 'Christmas present'. Happy and surprised at his thoughtfulness. "Tell Bakara thank you, from both of us. And if it would help you," and here Hannah's tone turned mischievous, "I could send a good word to your mate about your perfect conduct."

Wrex smiled fiercely. "I may take you up on that, Hannah Shepard. Although...Bakara will want to know that I was...respectful. How many days have you been with Shepard?"

"At least the six days since I've started counting. I leave when she's in surgery, sometimes," Hannah said quietly. "Just to get a drink or grab a shower. I'm the only one here for her, Wrex, and I'm glad I _am_ here." Her eyes turned toward the curtained bed at the far end of the room. "But I'm also happy you came. She'll love to hear from you."

An idea crystallized in Wrex's mind, and it was as if Bakara herself was speaking shamanic wisdom to him. "I'll stay here and talk to Shepard. You will go and take some time away."

At that, Hannah looked as if she didn't know what to say. Wrex forestalled any complaints by hefting her bag, dropping it into her arms, and propelling her out the door, which he then locked behind her. He listened for a moment to see if there would be an outcry, and when there was none, he chuckled. "Bakara'd loved to have seen that," he said aloud. "This gentleman thing is better than I thought."

Wrex walked up to Shepard's bed and just looked at her for a long moment. There wasn't much of her that he could actually see, beyond her closed eyes and bottom of her chin. Every other inch of her face was covered in white bandages. But Wrex knew from long experience that there was more to Shepard than met the eye, no matter what she looked like. The void couldn't hold her before, and she was not giving in this time, either.

So he pulled up a chair and sat. "Shepard. I thought a lot about what I wanted to remember with you. I know we haven't been through as much together as you and Tali or Garrus, but when you're me, you've got to put the krogan people first. And now we have a place in the galaxy again, Shepard. Thanks to you. And me," Wrex added as a humorous afterthought.

"So...about the time you went into my weapons' locker for the very first time. And how you made it up to me afterwards."

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Wrex had gotten up that morning feeling rather stiff; the human bunks made no allowance in their contours for the hard shell of a mature krogan. He didn't know how that turian or even the quarian managed to be comfortable, either. Did humans ever consider investing in the flexi-mesh bunks that conformed to multiple alien species? No, they only thought of themselves.

Breakfast did little to improve his mood; humans seemed to lack a fundamental percentage of meat in their diets. They curiously favored grains and plants, which Wrex didn't object to...as long as it was garnishing _meat._ He had eyed the gruel-like substance with obvious distaste and hadn't even bothered to take any, settling instead for the one good thing humans had invented: coffee.

Something about his demeanor must have warned the humans to steer clear of him that morning. Even Kaidan, who was in general polite to everyone, was silent in the mess hall. The only thing he asked Wrex was, "Wrex, did you ever hear the phrase 'get up on the wrong side of the bed'?"

Wrex hoped that the instant the biotic human had opened his mouth, he'd known he'd made a mistake. "Bed? You wanna talk about how you could possibly call those things _beds?!"_ Kaidan's eyebrows shot straight up, and the LT practically jumped up, dumped his dishes in the sink, and quick-marched from the room.

The krogan snorted with a small amount of sadistic pleasure before finishing his coffee and making his way down to the cargo bay. Garrus was apparently already up, which wasn't too unusual-turians had odd day/night cycles to begin with, especially coming off of the Citadel timetable. He had his entire avian upper body stuck completely into one of the side panels on the Mako, and all Wrex could hear were some muttered complaints and a few choice phrases that may or may not have included Shepard's name.

"Good morning, Wrex," Ashley greeted him, apparently unaware of his bad mood. She was hard at work already, dismantling what looked like one of the new pistols brought back from the last mission.

Wrex tried to muster up another grumpy outburst, but found he couldn't at Ashley's genuinely cheerful attitude. But then:

"Commander Shepard wanted me to tell you that she went through our lockers last night. She'd been meaning to do it for awhile," Ashley said, sighting through the gun's scope before setting it aside.

Wrex's fixed a dangerous glare on the gunnery chief, who was too busy piecing out the pistol and inspecting each component with an expert eye to notice his look. "What's she done?"

"Just changed some weapons out after modding them. I think she found some new suits of armor, too. I know Kaidan got one. Wish she'd find some heavy human armor in my size," Ashley said. "If I have to buff one more husk bite or claw mark out of my armor...grr. You'd think they _liked_ pink."

Wrex didn't wait to hear any more; he strode to the stand of weapons lockers and jerked the door of his open. What he _didn't_ notice immediately was the way Ashley was watching him out of the corner of her eye. There was indeed a different suit inside; silver with blue markings on it. It was certainly heavier stuff than he'd brought with him, no doubt made with...

He heard snickering; the filtered giggling of a quarian and somebody with her. Wrex glanced around sharply, but saw nothing. Suspicious, he turned the suit around...and saw the stylized paint job on the back of the hard shell. He wasn't all that familiar with human symbols, but he knew flowers when he saw them. What was worse, the flowers weren't a matching blue-they were an eye-shocking purple color.

Wrex let out a warning growl and spun on Ashley, who had the back of her hand pressed against her mouth in order to keep her laughter silent. When she saw him looking, she let out a yelp and dove under her workbench. "I know nothing!" she called from cover. "Abso-_lute_-ly nothing!"

"Vakarian!" Wrex shouted across the cargo bay. "Did _you_ know about this?!"

Few things could pull Garrus Vakarian out of a calibration project. As it turned out, a mildly furious krogan wasn't one of them. The turian kept working, oblivious.

"Shepard!" he bellowed next. "I know you're down here!"

As if summoned, the elevator doors parted and the commander came out, dragging a large crate behind her. She glanced in his direction, and her eyes widened. "Something wrong, Wrex?" she asked, making her way over and dropping the crate to the floor with a _clunk._

"What is this?" he demanded, thrusting the suit at her.

"Well...I'm no expert on art, but I'd say the suit I found on Trebin had a previous owner," Shepard replied with an absolutely straight face. Wrex fixed her with a suspicious stare, which she returned with equanimity. It was then that he noticed a small patch of what appeared to be white paint behind her left ear.

"I'll give you one last chance, Shepard," he said, voice rumbling dangerously. "Did you paint these?" He pointed accusingly at the flowers.

"No," she answered sincerely. Then after a beat, the commander said, "But the rather large _butterfly_ on Kaidan's armor is another story."

With a wordless roar, Wrex threw the armor on the ground and came at her. Shepard remained in place and, to her credit, only flinched when he was within inches. "Oh, relax, Wrex. It's water-soluble. It'll wash right off in the first good rain," she insisted. "It's just a little prank."

"I-you...what were you _doing_ last night?" Wrex asked, reigning in his temper with some effort.

A wicked grin spread across Shepard's face. "That is a_ secret,_ Urdnot Wrex. And, I have a little something to buy your silence...at least until Garrus and Kaidan look in their lockers." She kicked the crate at her feet for emphasis. "I put shredder rounds in your new Kovalyov assault rifle. Figured you could use some target practice with it. Just make sure not to damage the ship."

Wrex pried up the lid of the crate and blinked. "Shepard, aren't these...?"

"Ask me no questions, Wrex," the commander said, putting up her hand. "Just find a way to make them disappear." She glanced at the ruined couch cushions in the bottom of the crate, undoubtedly from her quarters. And then her mischievous smile was back. "Totally worth it."

Then she glanced around. "Have you seen Tali or Liara?"

Wrex remembered the snickering from earlier and opened his mouth to reply. Then he thought about it and said, "I don't know what you mean, Shepard. I haven't seen anything this morning, except some new padded targets for practice."

"Good man, Wrex," Shepard replied with a grin.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"You know, Shepard, I never did tell Vakarian or Kaidan where their armor improvements came from," Wrex said a bit nostalgically. "Not that they'd ever asked me."

He leaned back in his chair and stretched for a moment. "I gotta tell you, Shepard...sometimes I miss the old crew. Not enough to forget my duties to my people; did I tell you we've negotiated for a couple of planets already? When the relays are fixed, the krogan will have a new homeworld waiting for them."

There was a tentative knock on the door.

"Must be your mother," Wrex said. "Just some advice, Shepard. Don't keep her waiting on you. I know they're telling you chances aren't good, but you and I both know you're gonna make liars out of them. Besides, as much as I hate to admit it, I've got an alliance with your 'boyfriend's' people. I'd hate to see it fall apart because you'd do something inconvenient like dying."

He got up then, and unlocked the door. Hannah Shepard looked at him, and there was a little more color in her face than before. Her hair was bound up neatly, and she had on a fresh uniform. Wrex stood aside for her, and she ventured back into the room. "Did you have a good talk?" she asked cheerfully, putting her duffel back.

"Just remembering old times on the_ Normandy,"_ Wrex replied. "And I've got more where that came from, so I'll be back another time. Just to make sure Bakara doesn't worry."

"Oh, of course," Hannah said with a sage nod. "I'll make sure to mention how respectful you were, throwing me out of the room."

A small tingle of apprehension pulsed at the base of Wrex's spine, but Hannah Shepard raised her hand before he could say anything. "I needed to get out, Urdnot Wrex. You were right."

"Uh huh. Well, good. At least tell Bakara that much; the female thinks I can't do a thing without her leadership." He snorted to show what he thought of_ that_ idea.

Hannah smiled. "The next time you come by, you'll have to tell me more about the krogan battle songs you taught to the crew."

The wrinkles around Wrex's eyes deepened as he thought. "Battle songs? I never..._oh._ Were there batarians involved?"

"I believe so, yes," Hannah said slowly. "It was part of a message from Garrus. He actually, um...performed one of them."

A wide grin split Wrex's face. "Any chance it was a video file?"

"Yes, it is," Hannah answered. "If you want to see it..." She turned on her omnitool and searched through the _Normandy_ messages. "How about if I forward it to you?"

Wrex chuckled; he flicked on his own omnitool and waited a moment for it to accept the syncing request. A few seconds later, the file came through as a compressed packet. "Should be entertaining," he said with no small amount of anticipation. He straightened and held out his hand. "If you need anything, Hannah Shepard, I will do what I can to help."

"Thank you, Wrex," Hannah replied, shaking his hand. "I look forward to your next visit."

Wrex saw himself out. _As do I, Hannah Shepard. Maybe I'll tell you about tackling a shuttle full of mercs next time._ He sighed. _Good times._


	9. Day Eight

_Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me). _

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Day Eight_  
_(Week 2, Day 1)_

_"Major Alenko,"_ Admiral Hackett's hologram greeted Kaidan. "_It's been a week since we reestablished contact with the _Normandy_. I know it probably hasn't been easy for you to take command with Commander Shepard gone."_

"The crew is handling it pretty well, sir, all things considered," Kaidan responded. "We're keeping busy, which helps. So does the end of the reapers."

_"Well, the reapers have been dealt with, but Cerberus is another story,"_ Hackett said. _"Our intelligence teams have scattered reports of still-active cells. We don't have any clear idea of what they're really up to."_

"Do you think there's a power vacuum created by the death of the Illusive Man, sir?" Kaidan asked. "Will someone try to assume control of the organization?"

Hackett's image shifted as the admiral rubbed his chin in thought. _"Unknown, Major. We've got the Illusive Man's body, recovered from the Conduit, along with Admiral Anderson. There's a bit of a political argument going on as to what to do with it. Some scientists want to do an autopsy, whereas others—particularly Miranda Lawson—want to incinerate it. She seems to think that if given half a chance, sleeper agents will try to take the body and do to the Illusive Man what she did to Commander Shepard on Project Lazarus."_

Kaidan stared at Hackett in mute shock. Yet he wouldn't put such an action past the Illusive Man; he was a megalomaniacal genius who would stop at nothing to ensure his goals. Surely there had to be a plan in place in the event of his untimely death.

_"From what Miss Lawson says, in order to recreate the exact persona of the Illusive Man, Cerberus would need to get ahold of his brain; everything else can be recreated or enhanced by synthetic and cybernetic means."_

The major found himself nodding before he spoke up. "She's right, sir. We've found out the hard way that Cerberus has no moral objections to doing whatever it takes to follow orders. If my recommendation means anything, listen to Miranda. She cut her ties with Cerberus and was nearly killed by Kai Leng; she has a better idea than anyone about what that organization can do."

Hackett nodded. _ "I'll take your opinion under advisement, Major. I'm also going to pass a couple of assignments on to you, since you'll be one of the only stealth units available once you reach the Pylos Nebula. At one time, Cerberus had an interest in one of the planets out there, when geth activity was at its peak. I'll send the full report to you; intel suggests its worth checking out."_

"Yes sir," Kaidan said with a salute.

_"Hackett out."_

Kaidan switched off the comm panel and stood staring at the dark space where the admiral's holo image had been. _And so it begins,_he thought with some anticipation. Not that he minded helping the crew move large bins of ore around, squeezing as much of it as possible into every possible nook and cranny of the _Normandy_. It was an interesting change to just do manual work alongside the rest of the crew. Of course, he'd also felt like he'd pulled something in every part of his body when he'd woken up the next morning, but that came with the job.

He was expecting to spend another half day at the mining platform, before the A Team from Aysith showed up to start loading ore on their ships. The _Normandy_ was already packed to the pylons, so now the techs were assisting in relocating one of the platforms to a newer, richer pocket of palladium that the_ Normandy_ had prospected while waiting for the C Team to depart two days ago.

Kaidan had received a brief update from Tali late last night; text-only. She seemed to think that with a minimum amount of patching using the next two shipments of ore, it would be safe to restart the mass effect field at the relay. Of course, they were going to have to get the ore refined and fabricated first, and they couldn't afford to cut corners.

_I guess we're all learning new things,_ Kaidan thought to himself, turning and walking through the War Room. He paused at the security checkpoint, where Private Campbell greeted him and waved him through. The CIC seemed empty with all the techs hard at work elsewhere; Traynor was the only person in sight.

"You've received messages from Admiral Hackett on the private terminal, Major," Traynor said, glancing over her shoulder. "Also, Joker wanted me to tell you that he'd like to speak with you in the AI core."

"Oh...thanks," he said, pausing on his way to the terminal. Joker had had a much more positive outlook since the journey home had officially begun. Kaidan put a lot of that down to Liara's influence; the asari seemed to have decided that, among her other duties as Shadow Broker, she needed to keep track of Joker as well. He knew that the pilot was interested in reactivating EDI, if such a thing could be done, and with last day or so being stuck docked to the mining platform, Joker had been absent from the helmsman's chair.

_What've you been doing down there?_ Kaidan wondered. He looked from the private terminal, with its blinking indicator light, to the elevator. _ First things first,_ he decided, pulling up the messages from Hackett. He briefly glanced through the two assignments before transferring the necessary data to his omnitool for further review. There were also additional messages, some personal, others from the Alliance, which Kaidan skimmed through. He'd get to them later. But then the last one caught his attention: Councilor Sparatus. The text read:

_Spectre Alenko:_

_The Council requests that you look into a potential situation for us. A turian Spectre named Vitrian Corbus, accompanied by a Cabal was sent to investigate crucial economic holdings in the Kalabsha system just before the end of the war. It's been long enough that we fear his mission is incomplete at best, and compromised at worst._

_In lieu of you having Spectre Shepard's ship at your disposal, as well as her team, we request that you take over Vitrian's assignment and report back your findings._

_Councilor Sparatus_

Kaidan reread the message and transferred the attached data packet to his omnitool before turning off the terminal and going up to the galaxy map's platform. Traynor had updated the display to indicate which relays were functioning presently, as well as the most recent traffic reports between systems.

The Kalabsha system was out in the Nubian Expanse, precisely where the _Normandy_ wasn't planning to go. But it made sense to send a Spectre; that far out into the Attican Traverse, the Council was right to be concerned about starting an incident with whatever remained of the pirate and merc forces out in the Terminus Systems.

He could respect the Council's tactical decision, but that didn't mean he had to like the fact that it was going to tack extra days onto the Normandy's journey back to the local cluster.

Before his mind wandered too far, Kaidan headed to the elevator. He selected the third deck and, while he waited, pulled up one of the assignments from Hackett. The first was on a planet called Canalus, in the Dirada system. The available information from the Alliance suggested that Cerberus had previously had some interest in a particular site that had been controlled by the geth.

The elevator doors parted, interrupting Kaidan's reading. He closed the report and made his way to the AI core, greeting Dr. Chakwas in passing. When he activated the doors, they opened to reveal both Joker and Engineer Adams.

"Kaidan. Wow, that was fast," Joker said from where he was sitting gingerly in a chair, a portable terminal open on his lap. "I only talked to Traynor a few minutes ago." Then he apparently glanced at his watch. "Oh. I mean...an hour ago."

"She said you were up to something down here," Kaidan replied. His gaze strayed to where the immobile robot body was laid out on a workbench on the back wall. "What is it?"

Joker's face broke into a grin. "Liara hired Kasumi to steal the Cerberus plans for EDI."

Kaidan wasn't sure he had heard correctly; he blinked. "Run that by me again?"

"Uh, okay. The Prothean Expert hired the Master Thief to steal the Bad-Guy Cerberus plans for my super-hot disability mech," Joker tried.

"Kasumi worked with Shepard when you were with Cerberus," Kaidan put together. "And Liara is paying her to-"

"To steal stuff from Cerberus. Yeah. Turns out, Kasumi was making a regular tour of known Cerberus stations and pilfering whatever she thought would be useful for the Crucible. Since Liara knows everything, she asked Kasumi to do a job for her." Joker pointed to the screen. "I'm running an analysis of the code that's in EDI's blue box, versus what Cerberus had on record. There's some gaps, obviously, but it's a start."

Adams was monitoring his own portable terminal, hooked directly into one of the core's consoles. "We still haven't had our request for the original Titan VI code granted yet, which may help with some of the missing code strings," he said.

"If you promise to be careful and not activate anything without telling me first, then I'll make a special Spectre request for it," Kaidan said after a moment of thought. "We've already got a couple of assignments to do, and it would be a whole lot easier to do them if the Normandy had her weapons and electronics specialist back."

"You got it, Major," Joker said with a salute. He sobered, however, as Kaidan turned to leave. "Hey, Kaidan?"

"Yeah?"

"Are you going to tell the Alliance we're putting an AI back into the ship? Seems to me the rules about that haven't changed." Joker's eyes narrowed. "Especially after finding out the reapers were one huge artificial intelligence, according to Leviathan."

Kaidan paused in the doorway. He sighed. "This is one of those things where it might be better to ask forgiveness instead of permission." He thought some more, then finally shook his head. "I don't know yet, Joker. Until we know it's actually possible to bring EDI back, it's not a question we have to answer. Keep me updated. And...let me know your thoughts."

"Can do." Joker and Adams got back to work.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"Hey, _chica nueva!_ Did ya miss me?" James hollered into his helmet mic as the_ Normandy_ shuttle settled onto the mining platform with only three moderate thumps. He stood together with the last of the crewmen that had been sent over, bone-weary and in need of a shower. If James could have found a way to sleep in the shower, he'd have it made.

_"Stand clear of the hatch,"_ was Holloway's only reply before she popped the latch and pushed the door up.

"All right team, let's move!" James said, motioning for Copeland to get aboard. "There's a nice soft bunk up there with my name on it!" He closed the hatch behind him and muscled his way to the copilot's seat. Holloway's steely gaze was fastened on her screens, and she lifted off as soon as she had clearance.

"Anything to report?" James asked Holloway in a more serious tone.

"Nothing official, sir," she said. "We've just been moving the ore, packing it into whatever crates we have."

"And what's the scuttlebutt?" he asked her.

She guided the shuttle into a climbing arc, bringing the nose around as the_ Normandy_ descended into view on the forward video screens. "Scuttlebutt is that Major Alenko's got some new assignments, but they'll have to wait until the relay's fixed."

James sat back and looked at her with a grin. Holloway must have sensed him looking and shot him a glare. "I'm impressed, _chica._ I didn't know if you'd pay attention to that stuff. Not being a crewman, and all."

Her eyes widened in a brief betrayal of shock, but then narrowed just as quickly. "Well, then I won't listen next time, sir."

"Holloway."

"Yes, sir."

"It's a _joke."_

"Whatever you say, sir."

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Garrus paced back and forth restlessly in the main battery; eight paces in each direction. He hummed a little under his breath, testing his subtones to make sure he could achieve the correct note of sincerity.

The last two days had been a blur; when he wasn't making room in the battery for various crates packed full of all the little supplies that had been cleared from the cargo bays, or handling different requests from the Hierarchy in his unending list of messages and reports, he'd been trying to compose an intelligent and well-worded answer to Hannah Shepard's vid message. He'd thought about asking for help, but had no idea who to go to. Of the remaining squadmates on the ship, only Kaidan had an intact relationship with his mother, and Garrus wasn't sure, especially after reliving the bar incident, that he wanted to go to the major with anything having to do with his and Shepard's relationship.

He also hadn't had time to do all the research he wanted, and the generalized human social interaction vids on the extranet only helped so much. Shepard herself had demonstrated that humans valued spontaneity and genuine communication of feelings. It was truly a shame, and Garrus hadn't thought it for the first time, that the structures inside the human ear could not distinguish between turian vocal tones enough to interpret subtone flanging.

That was one of the things that made him awkward around Shepard to begin with. It wasn't like speaking with a female turian (which truth be told, also wasn't a skill he possessed) who would be able to pick up his feelings and intentions from his very first sentence. No, humans evaluated many things, such as eye movement, posture, and most difficult for turians: facial expression. Garrus found that he had to try much harder to communicate on the romantic front when he was physically standing in front of his girlfriend. Sure, he'd had plenty of normal conversations with dozens of humans, so that sort of thing was second nature. But the next level? Or did humans call them bases? It left him stuttering like a hanar who'd had too much mindfish.

He'd even rehearsed a speech, just a little bit so that he wouldn't stumble over the words too much. But then Garrus had sighed rather irritably with himself. _You can't practice being natural...humans can just __**tell.**__ Not that it ever bothered Shepard, but... _His right mandible twitched in annoyance._ I'm not about to try and fool Hannah...the admiral._

In the end, Garrus knew he had to just go for it. He would just pretend he was...talking to Samara; someone he knew as an acquaintance and a matriarchal figure, as well as knowing her professionally. _ Right,_ he thought. _This is going to go __**great.**_

When he got to the observation lounge where the drone usually resided, he was surprised to see Javik. The Prothean turned when he heard the door open; Garrus' browplates lifted slightly. He might not see eye-to-eye with Javik on everything, or even want to spend much time in his company (Shepard had once, after a brief spat with the Prothean, compared him to a militant form of some creature called an 'Eeyore' from Earth folklore) but at the moment Javik looked puzzled.

"Vakarian," Javik greeted. It made Garrus a little wary; only lately had Javik taken to calling everyone by their given names. He'd started with Liara, shortly after Thessia had been destroyed, and gradually changed his manner of speech to address the_ Normandy_ crew appropriately.

"Javik. What brings you over here?" Garrus noted that the Prothean was back in his armor, which appeared to have been freshly cleaned. "Were you...using the camera drone?"

"No. I can't," Javik stated, folding his hands behind his back and looking out the window. "The doctor called Chakwas has said that it is to be only good memories. I do not think that anything in my experience is right for that. I am but a relic from a time of war that has finally ended. What could the avatar of vengeance say when his thirst for blood is sated?"

Garrus thought about it. "I don't know. What does vengeance say to victory?" he mused.

Javik turned to look over his shoulder at the turian. "At one time, victory could not stop vengeance. The need for revenge runs deep, driving the desire to keep killing, keep avenging—" he cut himself off. "But that was my cycle. This cycle belongs to the new races."

"Not the 'primitive' races?" Garrus said with a slight teasing subtone.

"Your races have already been given more time than mine," Javik said. "However primitive they seem to me, they will not remain that way. You have a chance to exceed any evolution that came before you, because the reapers will no longer harvest. Prothean knowledge will itself become primitive in this new order."

"I think that was almost a compliment," Garrus said with some surprise. "So...vengeance yields to victory."

Javik went back to looking out the window. "It appears so."

"There must be something in your experiences that wasn't all about war," Garrus said, taking a seat by the drone. He tapped into the recording logs; they appeared to have been recently cleared by Allers in order to make room in the drone's memory banks. "What about when Shepard took apart your particle beam and put 'primitive' mods in it? Or on Utukku when we fell in that blue glowing mire trying to save the rachni queen?"

"I did not find either of those things to be amusing," Javik said flatly.

"At the time, probably not. I know I didn't enjoy cleaning my armor after that mission with all those ravagers exploding everywhere. But you have to think about the big picture here," Garrus said. "The two of us hauling ourselves up Shepard to get out? Pretty crazy."

"We injured her shoulder," Javik said, clearly not understanding how the situation could be portrayed as humorous.

"A bit, but Chakwas patched her up," Garrus said. He tapped the camera drone for emphasis. "Now you're just stalling, Javik. Tell you what: I'll help you out this once."

The Prothean turned and stared inscrutably at the turian for a long moment. "Fine."

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"Shepard, I'm sending you my armor cleaning bill for this mess," Garrus groused.

"If I'd known you were going to be this whiny about a couple clingy cobwebs I'd've brought James," the commander replied in a tone that was probably meant to tease, but ended up just sounding preoccupied. She hefted the Firestorm she'd appropriated at Grunt's suggestion and incinerated another curtain of webbing before switching on the tactical light at the end of her weapon. The only other illumination in the room ahead came from some sort of crevice to the right. A glance below revealed their first look at some sort of blue viscous goo, which had the additional property of providing faint light.

Garrus and Javik tightened their hold on their respective weapons as the sudden skittering of small, insectoid feet seemed to cross in front of the group. Shepard jumped back, and her light dipped as she searched in front of her for the source.

"Movement!" Garrus clipped out, trying to keep his voice quiet. "Did anybody else catch that?" He was starting to get a creeping feeling on the back of his neck, but he pushed it away.

"Confirmed," Javik said from beside him. The Prothean strained to see ahead of him with all four of his eyes, expecting the worst at any moment. The edge of Shepard's beam of light hit upon something gray and bulbous; a whole lot of somethings as she took a closer look.

"Careful," Garrus warned, but too late; the closest pod burst against Shepard's shield, and she jumped away from the rest before she could trigger any more.

"We need to be cautious," Javik said. He could sense the moving life in these walls, scurrying everywhere, but he did not know if they were reapers, rachni, or merely indigenous life. Shepard shot him a look over her shoulder, which he interpreted as one of the many forms of human sarcasm.

Without hesitation, the commander turned her weapon upon the strange pods, ensuring that nobody got as close as she had. The further down the path they went, the more Javik was sure...a glint of metal on the floor caught his eyes. Flexible metal piping wound through the egg sacs, and he raised his particle beam a little further. "Those cords, Shepard. Reaper technology."

"Maybe," Shepard said uneasily, taking care to illuminate where they were walking so no one tripped. Further ahead was a puddle of the eerily-glowing liquid they'd seen before; the commander took the lead as she stepped cautiously through it, coming to a larger subterranean chamber with many stalagmites and rocky ledges.

The trio hadn't advanced more than five steps into the cave, when..._something_ appeared on a rocky outcropping across the room. Javik had a clear view of it; Garrus used the scope on his sniper rifle just to make sure. It was a bloated, rachni-turned-reaper with an optical array framed by twin cannons on either side, and Javik's lip curled to reveal his teeth as he watched a swarm of smaller mechanical insects scurry over the far ledge, presumably already on their way to engage them.

All this the two of them took in in less than two seconds; Shepard was scanning the perimeter, and Garrus called out the target. "Along the far wall, Shepard. Is that rachni?"

Her head turned and she brought up her omnitool. "Good eye," Shepard said over her shoulder. She tapped her comm and got ahold of Grunt, explaining the situation in short bursts between shooting an overload pulse at a barrier engine. She bit off an epithet as a husk seized that moment to close on her; she pinned the creature against a rock and used the butt of her weapon to take it out, just as Javik fired the final shot into the rachni ravager across the room. A new army of swarmers burst from the oozing, toxic corpse and came blindly at the squad.

Garrus picked them off with precision before they could get too close. "I hardly recognize them," he muttered. "The reapers made some modifications."

Once Shepard was satisfied the room was clear, she waved them forward and updated Grunt at the same time.

_"Nothing here yet,"_ Grunt reported. _ "Lost a krogan to a sinkhole. Bad way to go."_

"These caverns are not as stable as they appear," Javik said to the others. "I can sense movement in many tunnels; like a hive." Garrus nodded and filed that observation away as Shepard knelt beside another krogan scout on the left side of the room. Pressing on, they discovered more reaper technology in the form of metal barriers linked to some manner of node. It didn't take long for Shepard to disable it, but the moment they advanced, there was a warning rumble overhead.

In the split second before the world began to crumble, Javik thrust his hand out, pushing aside the first of the falling debris with his biotic power as the three of them rolled in a mad scramble to avoid the mass of rocky debris descending upon them.

"Shepard!" Garrus shouted, briefly losing sight of the commander as dust clogged the air. Gradually, the sound of falling rocks subsided, dwindling to only the occasional loose pebble bouncing away down the landslide that was now behind them.

Javik got to his feet and studied the obstacle. There was no way to clear it in a rush, and he told Shepard so. She passed that on Grunt, who had heard and felt the cave-in from his position. Javik's trust in the stability of the cave system decreased even further.

Shepard motioned them forward, and soon they were bogged down in more of the blue goo, shooting husks, cannibals, and swarmers. Javik quickly surmised the reapers' tactics; use the advantage a large cavern gave them to flank the squad and hope that they could divide the trio's attention enough to make an impact. Garrus, however, was much too accurate with his sniper rifle to allow it. Shepard's preferred method of taking cover behind a central large rock allowed her to pick off husks one at a time. Javik was briefly impressed with their efficiency, but that moment of inattention cost him as a ravager across the room fired a volley that punched through his shield, then his armor, scoring his side and forcing him to his knees.

"Shepard...!" Garrus shouted without breaking concentration, using concussive shot on a cannibal that got a little too close. "Javik's down!"

Lowering her Firestorm, the commander pulled a medi-gel packet from her hip pocket and tore a corner off with her teeth. She tossed it up to the turian, who was beside Javik on the ledge before deploying her combat drone to support her while she kept the rest of the reaper forces at bay. She blasted incinerate after incinerate at the ravager, which finally fell just as Javik got back up.

"No lying down on the job," Shepard said with a humorless grin. "Dr. Chakwas is finally going to have something to do."

"More of your human sarcasm," Javik said as the medi-gel numbed the graze to his ribs. The team splashed through more puddles of the blue stuff, and as they pressed towards where the central chamber had to be, Shepard pointed out an increase in the size of the spore pods. When she raised her Firestorm to incinerate a group, swarmers burst out of them, eliciting a surprised yelp from the commander and a kill-on-sight reaction from Javik with his particle beam.

"Watch the bugs, Shepard," Garrus advised calmly. She shot him a look before finishing off the stand of pods.

"The rachni usually dwell on toxic planets," Javik observed. "This is different."

"The reapers must have changed them," Garrus said. "They definitely look different. I bet they're breeding an army down here. Breeding like flies... and this place is well hidden. I mean, it adds up."

"I agree." Shepard nodded as she picked her way up the path, passing a waterfall that plunged into a deep pit many feet beneath. Gunfire echoed off the walls; ahead were red flashes of light as the Aralakh company fought below. They were trapped, and it became a race against the determined ravagers to get the krogan company out of the direct line of fire before there were no krogan left. Shepard got them past another of the metal reaper tech walls, but it was only a temporary reprieve. It was decided that the krogan would be the rearguard while Shepard's team made the final push into the central chamber, but they didn't make it twenty meters before pods blocked their way. Garrus' warning was unnecessary; Shepard fired the flamethrower without a second thought. Javik's rifle snapped out beams with an alien-sounding twang, as more swarmers rushed to escape their burning pods.

Thus dealt with, the commander moved forward, only to have her progress barred by a narrow passage. She bent down to peer in before crawling inside on her belly. The other two followed; first Garrus and then Javik, who wasn't all that certain that the structural integrity of the tunnel would hold. The passage let out on a wide ledge, and as they straightened up, Garrus' gaze fastened on a huge reaper structure overhead. "What is _that?"_

"The only thing it could be. This is it," Shepard replied. She commed Grunt to fill him in, walking forward as she talked. Without warning,the same kind metal walls that had hindered them earlier forced their way from the ground, attempting to cut off the team. Shepard darted first one way, then another. "Move it!" she yelled, but the walls sealed the team in. Luck was with them, however; Shepard located a node to overload, and the wall on her right dropped. The screaming of husks massing on the other side was deafening.

Javik's four eyes widened, but he lost no time dropping into a defensive stance. "Heavy resistance!"

"This is it, people!" Shepard ducked into cover. The squad fought competently, but a couple of the husks got way too close for comfort. Garrus charged one, defeating it in hand-to-hand, while Shepard incinerated one that went for Javik. The Prothean made quick work of all the swarmers coming at them, swimming through the goo flooding the area between them and the far side of the cavern. Shepard's combat drone took out the final cannibal, and Garrus made his way across the shallow pond.

The shrieking around them intensified, reverberating ear-piercingly off of the walls. They turned; more rachni-turned-reapers had moved in behind them, obstructing their previous entrance. Shepard knelt in the goo, taking cover again as she set her combat drone on a cannibal across the room and targeted yet another ravager. In between shots, Garrus briefly saw her eyes widen and she turned sharply right as half a dozen swarmers paddled their way over to Javik, who had taken shelter behind another boulder to her right. She turned the Firestorm on them just as the Prothean jumped out of the way. By the time the last enemy fell and they got back to the other side of the room, another barrier engine energized in a further cul-de-sac on the left side of the large chamber.

Javik wiped some of the blue liquid from his weapon. "The enemy is as relentless as they were in our cycle," he said, eyes narrowing as the newest wave charged. The enemy had them pinned down; a small army of husks had Shepard cornered as a ravager focused all its attention on her. Her shield went down as she incinerated the first husk, just in time for a cannibal to get a lucky shot under the plating on her right shoulder. Javik saw her repeat the same field medicine technique to herself; she tore open a packet of medi-gel with her teeth and smeared it on the gash. Javik picked off the surviving couple of swarmers, and they advanced, disabling another reaper node. The shrieking peaked in intensity, and they whirled, looking for the source.

"There are more than I imagined!" Javik shouted over the discordant din, as more of the reapers charged from behind, forcing them all into cover again. Shepard tried to shout encouragement over the noise, but there was no silence until the last of the reapers had fallen. Garrus kicked a husk out of his way as they rounded yet another corner in the labyrinthine caverns...and came face to face with the rachni queen.

Javik froze, momentarily taken back in time to an era where the rachni were nothing more than violent weapons to be turned at the Protheans' enemies. A krogan corpse at Shepard's feet suddenly jerked, and began to speak as the rachni queen used his voice. The commander was not afraid; she approached and spoke with the queen directly, inquiring about the reapers, the queen's loyalty, and whether or not she would help them fight the reapers. Javik found he could not help himself; he walked over to one of the many krogan bodies lining the walls of the chamber, speaking as one of the queens many voices, and touched it.

The images he received were confusing at first; the primitive identity of the krogan still lingered, but melded with it was a strange sort of...melody. It was haunting, and incomplete. It sang of sorrow for children betrayed and lost to the queen, and then the melody crescendoed in anger; fury towards the abominations that had soured her song and turned what had once been harmonious into discord—he pulled away.

Shepard was now arguing with Grunt over the comms about saving the queen; the tank-bred swore at her and then came barreling through the cave toward them.

"Commander—" Javik started to say, but she cut him off.

"She's too valuable an asset to lose," Shepard insisted. "We're getting her out of here." She overloaded the final node, and the queen was free. "Lead the way, Grunt." The krogan didn't wait for a second invitation; he turned tail and led the charge.

The horrible shrieking of dozens of ravagers shrilled off the walls around them; Javik wondered at the stone's ability to hold out against such frequencies as they pelted headlong down a path only Grunt seemed to know. Suddenly the krogan pulled them up short; a half dozen ravagers clogged the tunnel ahead. Grunt said a quiet word to Shepard, who touched him on the shoulder. She threw a glance back at Garrus and Javik.

"Let's go," she said simply, tossing her final Firestorm to the ground. And with that, the krogan took off down the tunnel, and Shepard bolted into a side passage as the angry cries of the reapers rose to a fever pitch, answered by Grunt's gunfire. They splashed through more blue puddles, clawed their way up inclines, and negotiated multiple rocky ledges. Garrus could just make out what looked like natural light in the distance as Shepard vaulted a crevice in the floor and tried to keep on going. The instant her boots hit the far side, there was a dangerous crack and she stumbled but managed to keep her footing. Garrus and Javik were already hurtling through the air; the turian managed to cushion his own fall by using his spring-like legs to lessen the impact, but Javik was not so fortunate.

With a heart-stopping rumble, the floor dropped away beneath the three of them. Amidst a chorus of half-formed yells and curses, Shepard grabbed madly for purchase at the new edge of the crevice and managed to hang on. Garrus and Javik, however, landed up to their torsos in a mire of the glowing blue liquid and disintegrating rock particles. Garrus looked around for handholds or outcroppings; any way to climb back out.

"I do not see a way up," Javik said tensely, performing the same search as the turian.

"No time!" Shepard yelled down over her shoulder. "Garrus, can you reach me?"

"If I jump," he said, trying to pull his legs out of the mire. He succeeded in freeing himself so that he could wade over and make a somewhat clumsy leap to grab on.

"Climb," Shepard gasped. "And hurry!"

Garrus opened his mouth, probably to protest, but he didn't. Wordlessly, he gripped first her belt, then the ridge on the back of her armor just below the collar, followed by the plating on her arm, and then he was able to get purchase on the ledge and haul himself up.

Javik didn't hesitate at all; if there was a choice between him being overwhelmed by altered rachni or using a primitive as a ladder, the solution was obvious. Garrus managed to grab the Prothean by the front of his armor just as the rock beneath Shepard's left hand crumbled.

She cried out briefly, but then Garrus was pulling her up and there was no time for anything else but running, running, running. Javik and Garrus could feel the goo drying between the plates of their armor, but they forced their limbs to move anyway, just as daylight finally washed over them. The shuttle sat up on a hill in the distance, and only then did the three of them slow for a breather. They trudged the last hundred meters to the Kodiak, and Cortez opened the hatch for them. Shepard held her right arm close to her body, and she turned slowly to survey the cave exit for one final moment...and then the gleam of sunshine off of krogan armor caught Garrus' eye.

Shepard had already seen; she moved faster than Garrus felt he could have and tried to grab the young krogan as his knees buckled. He was so covered in blood and other substances that Garrus was surprised he was still standing. Javik jumped down from the shuttle and went to assist the two walking wounded. Once they were all loaded in the shuttle, and Garrus had put medi-gel on the worst of Grunt's wounds, _and_ Doctor Chakwas had been notified that three of the shuttle's passengers would be paying her a visit...those that could started peeling off their armor.

"Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh..." Shepard muttered over and over. "A shower. I need a shower. _Two _showers. Chakwas can have me after that." She shivered, her hair matted to her head where her teammates had doused her with the blue liquid during their climb.

"I hope you can recommend a good cleaning service for my armor," Garrus said dryly. "I'm going to dry in this position and will have to waddle off of the shuttle." He worked his boots off, not caring how indecorous it appeared. Even Javik, who had never been seen without his armor, looked sorely tempted to get it off before it solidified to his body.

By the time Cortez had maneuvered the Kodiak back into the _Normandy's_ bay, there was a pile of human, turian, and krogan suit parts in the middle of the shuttle floor. And as Shepard, Grunt, Garrus, and Javik stumbled out into the shuttle bay, there were still pieces of it hitting the floor, all the way to the elevator. James Vega turned around from his workbench and just stared.

"This part...is_ not_ going in the report," Shepard said, pointing with her left hand at everyone present. "Understood?" She winced and went back to holding her right arm.

The elevator doors closed on Vega and Cortez's 'yes ma'ams'.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"And there you go," Garrus said, switching off the drone.

"We did not tell the commander anything she did not already know," Javik said somewhat pensively. "How is that helpful?"

"She gets to hear it from your point of view," Garrus replied, completing the entry and setting it up to transmit the next time Allers used the tightbeam. "Did you ever tell her what you heard from the rachni queen?"

"No," Javik said after a moment. "Sometimes I do forget that the commander is still just a human. She understand Prothean communication, but she will never have Prothean senses. It is good, then, that she will learn of that."

"And who knows?" Garrus said somewhat rhetorically. "How many other things like it could you share? Don't assume that Liara's the only one interested in what the last living Prothean has to say."

Javik looked out of the observation lounge's window thoughtfully, and behind him he heard the hiss of the doors as the turian departed.

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

_Author's Note: Apologies for the delay. I hope to write Days Nine and Ten before Saturday, so stay tuned and send my muse happy thoughts. And yarn._


	10. Day Nine

_Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. This fictional story is not making me any money (unless BioWare takes note and decides to pay me). _

A Hundred Memories for the Journey Home

_Day Nine  
(Week 2, Day 2)_

"Tell me what's new today, Glyph," Liara said, feeling uncharacteristically optimistic for some reason. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that Joker was no longer on her mind in such a worrisome sense. He'd found a new project, and with it, new purpose. Right now he had hope again, and Liara didn't want to take that from him. She dreaded what might happen if he ever saw the full report she had about Tiptree.

That caused her cheerful mood to dim significantly, but Liara pushed it away. That was what being the Shadow Broker meant—collecting all the information possible, despite it being good or bad. The longer she wore the mantle of the galaxy's most powerful informant, the more Liara was coming to realize that the intel she received only took on positive or negative connotations based on who she sold it to.

"Goddess," she said aloud, sitting down at one of the terminals in her quarters suddenly. _ Am I so calloused?_ Liara paused and reflected on that. _Don't I have to be?_

Glyph, however, didn't notice her moment of thought and hadn't wasted time in compiling the morning's report for her, based on the top issues she was tracking currently, as well as the recurring points of interest in all the networks she had access to. "You have received eighty-seven applications for the proposed agent positions within the new krogan government. I have filtered them and deem seven as worthy of your review. We have reestablished connections with Agents Garath, Nedra, Urnik, and Zarak. Garath and Zarak will need new placement due to the destruction of the colonies they were circled in."

Liara pulled their dossiers and transferred them to a datapad. Glyph had already prepared the applications for the krogan government infiltrators separately, and she stacked the pads together. "Go on," she encouraged the drone.

"I have updated each relay location on your display with its progress from yesterday, and transferred a copy to the War Room as you previously suggested," Glyph continued. "Thusfar we need not send help; but the Caleston Rift and Ninmah Cluster relays are being closely monitored. There have been reports of minor conflict between the repair forces."

Liara dismissed that as a lower-priority concern, what with learning about Kaidan's new orders yesterday. It appeared that they wouldn't be at the Caleston Rift relay as soon as she'd hoped, but there was nothing to be done about that. In the meantime, if the Shadow Broker needed to pull some strings and provide support or supplies, she could arrange that. As yet, however, the rest of the galaxy appeared to be doing its part to restore the relay network.

"Updated lists of casualties and survivors are also available," Glyph went on. "I can also provide them to the crew."

"Yes," Liara said with a nod. "Make that automatic unless any of the flagged names come up."

"Understood," Glyph said. "Parameters updated. You have also received status reports from Agents Angara, Drasnik..." Liara listened with half an ear, using a third datapad to download all the information Glyph mentioned for review.

"Any other galaxy news I should consider?" she asked Glyph when the drone appeared to wind down from its recitation of agents.

"There are general reports of pirate and merc activity beginning to resume in the Terminus Systems," the drone said. "There is a disturbance on the planet Reaio. Several known Cerberus facilities are reported to have increased activity. The krogan have begun to relocate fifteen percent of their technical population to the Serpent Nebula relay, to speed repairs."

In exchange for the assistance the krogan had rendered the turians, and also in part due to the unlikely respect Wrex and Primarch Victus had grudgingly afforded one another, the turian Hierarchy had conceded part of the Arrae system back to the krogan. Notably, the provision included Gellix and Antinax, which the krogan had originally lost to the turians after the Krogan Rebellions. _Wrex has to be pretty pleased with himself,_ Liara thought with a small smile. Naturally, then, it was in the krogans' best interest to get to the Minos Wasteland to lay official claim to their new homeworld, despite whatever condition it was in after the Reapers had come through. Liara's reports suggested that casualties had been minimal, as the only population on Gellix had been penal colonies. Even then, the Reapers would have had a hard time taking the planet, thanks in part to all the leftover live ordinance lying around.

_Wrex certainly isn't afraid of a challenge,_ she thought, getting up and going to the door with her fresh datapads in hand. _ I'm sure he accepted those planets as much for their symbology in krogan history as for their convenient placement._ "Thank you, Glyph," Liara said over her shoulder. "Please compile a further, in-depth report on each of the Cerberus locations with increased activity. Those that have a threat assessment of fifty or higher forward anonymously to Specialist Traynor through the discreet channels."

"Yes, Dr. T'Soni," Glyph said, and hummed about his work.

She ventured out into the mess area; she still had a few packets of her favorite tea left in reserve, and Liara thought she'd brew herself a cup while picking up crew gossip. That was one of the small indulgences she still permitted herself; spending time among a group of people that accepted her despite being an asari and just _listening._ Perhaps that was what had piqued her interest about being an information broker in the first place.

She set some water to boil before looking around for a prospective seat. She saw Dr. Chakwas sitting alone, tapping her fingers on a mug of what was probably coffee as she pored over a datapad of her own, her normally smooth features drawn and pensive. Whatever she was reading, Liara didn't think it was good news.

At the next table, it appeared that the new pilot, Holloway, had fallen asleep halfway through what looked like the remains of her dinner. She was attracting looks from a couple of the crewman who had risen early to get a head start on breakfast. Eventually, one of them took pity on Holloway and shook her shoulder. Once roused, the pilot rapidly excused herself and disappeared, her wild black hair obscuring her face, which Liara was sure was red from embarrassment.

_It's hard being an outsider,_ she reflected as she removed a cup from a cupboard nearby and placed her tea packet at the bottom. Steam momentarily clouded the air as she poured the water in, and then Liara chose a spot near Dr. Chakwas, in hopes that she might deduce what was troubling the physician.

"Oh, good morning Liara," Chakwas greeted, the furrows between her eyebrows lessening somewhat.

"Good morning," Liara said in return, setting her mug down with her datapads. "Is everything all right?"

The doctor's face went through a couple of different expressions; unhappy, frustrated, and finally Chakwas settled on stoic. "It's about the medical net; particularly the lack of resources able to get to Earth for the survivors." She shook her head. "It's fortunate that the forces remaining are able to still locate people alive there, but the amount of triage needed and the sheer medical supply inventory that would need to be maintained..." She went suddenly silent as she realized she was ranting a little bit.

"How long will the current supplies last?" Liara asked gently. "Are people in danger of not being treated at this moment?" Her mind was already hard at work on galaxy map calculations, her current resource network which was still seventy percent intact despite everything that had happened, and ships that could be diverted.

"The numbers the European MedNet gave suggest that if rescue efforts continue with no fluctuation in the survivors found, then even basic supplies like general antibiotics and medi-gel will be gone in two weeks," Chakwas said, unaware of Liara's thoughts. "The repair estimations on the Exodus Cluster relay are three weeks, minimum."

Liara blew on her hot tea for a moment, letting the _yaminni_ leaves' delicate scent curl around her in a relaxing fog that took her back to late evenings spent holed up in her reading room with her best friend from childhood, Cheria. Those had been innocent days, so far removed from this reality that it might as well have been a dream.

Dr. Chakwas was still speaking, and Liara forcibly returned her attention to the present. "Also, we finally have a full report on the casualties from the other colonies in the Sol system. Mars, as expected, was hit the hardest. The Reapers destroyed most of the Alliance naval academy, as well as the original Prothean discovery site where humanity discovered the mass relay technology. Ninety percent of the cities were leveled..." Karin Chakwas passed a hand over her eyes, and Liara saw that it was to brush away tears. "I had many friends and former colleagues there."

Liara reached over the table and touched the doctor's arm in sympathy. "I am sorry," she said sincerely. She remembered vividly how Thessia had looked when they had first landed; at times the image seemed to burn as a raw scar in her mind's eye. "It is very hard to see people you love turned into nothing more than a name or statistic."

"War is about casualty statistics," Chakwas said with a calm poise that Liara hadn't expected. "I once told Commander Shepard that the soldiers I care for are all my children, and with this war, I lose a little bit more of my family. Only now it isn't a little. I learned a long time ago that grieving over the dead is to ignore the living family and friends left." She placed her hand over Liara's and patted it, much like a parent would have done. "I have all of you here to remind me of that," Karin said with a small smile.

She cleared her throat suddenly and straightened her uniform before standing and collecting her dishes and her datapad. "Well, I suppose it's back to those consult requests I received from the krogan. You would think that Mordin consulted with me on all of his research, the way they ask." Dr. Chakwas managed a slight laugh and shook her head. "Oh, and Wrex sent me a message along with them; apparently he went to visit the commander and her mother. He told the commander a particular _story_...and wanted to know if **_I_** knew about painting flowers on a suit of armor...?"

Liara felt her face turning several shades bluer. She glanced around conspiratorially before asking, "Didn't you tell him no?"

"Of course," Chakwas said, her usual mischief returning a bit. "However, my wonderful shooting star motif on Garrus' armor was unparalleled."

"Yes, it was," Liara said, unable to restrain a laugh along with a wry shake of her head. "It really was a shame about Ashley's allergy to the paint, though."

"Oh, one simple antihistamine injection and she was right as rain," Chakwas said calmly. "I felt more sorry for the crewman who saw you go out of Shepard's quarters for the medkit."

Liara had to put a hold on that particular memory as the main battery doors parted and Garrus came out, ostensibly in search of whatever turians had for coffee. Her forehead wrinkled slightly as Liara realized she had no idea what Garrus' preference was. Nevertheless, Liara cleared her throat a bit obviously and inclined her head so that Dr. Chakwas turned to see what she was looking at.

The human woman's eyebrows went up in silent acknowledgement, and she turned so that Garrus couldn't see her face. "We'll talk about it later," she whispered. "When Tali gets back." And then Chakwas took her dishes to the sink, greeted Garrus with a good morning, and headed back into the med bay.

Liara watched her go with a bemused expression, until the turian came over with a dextro protein bar and a cup of hot...something. He sat across from her, and Liara grouped her datapads closer to herself in order to give him some room.

"Morning, T'Soni," he said in a rougher tone than normal.

"Are you sleeping in the battery now?" she teased him as Garrus took his first sip. He cleared his throat, and his subtones evened out.

"I've been sleeping there for two months, Liara," he said with his version of a grin. "One of the perks of dating the captain is that if you request to install your own flexi-mesh bed due to recurring spinal issues...she'll let you."

"I've never seen a bed in there," Liara said in some surprise.

"Well...it's one of those collapsing hammock-like things. And actually, Dr. Michel suggested it," Garrus confessed. "Might have even had a hand in inventing it, but who knows. Makes it easy to pick up and move to a human ship on a moment's notice."

"Well, with Wrex gone you are a minority," Liara said, drinking her tea. "I think even Tali uses the human beds."

"T'Soni, don't you _ever_ come out of your office?" Garrus asked with exaggerated exasperation. "Tali's used my hammock; did you know she once locked me out of the battery and told me to go sleep in Shepard's cabin? She finally bought her own a month ago when I threatened to calibrate her shotgun to make a particular noise when she fired it."

"What noise?" was the only thing Liara could come up with in response.

"There's a certain bird from Palaven; I've heard it compared to the Earth kookaburra or the Thessian _brillin,_" Garrus started, but Liara started to snicker behind her hand before he finished.

"Garrus Vakarian, how does Shepard put up with you?" she asked.

"Sometimes I wonder if the better question is: how did such a band of tricksters and mischief-makers save the galaxy not once, but _three_ times?" Garrus worked a piece off of his protein bar and ate it while waiting for Liara to finish sipping her tea.

"I have long since blamed any 'trickster' qualities I may have picked up entirely on Shepard," Liara said in excuse. "Although Doctor Chakwas has a similar propensity—" She stopped suddenly as Garrus cocked his head.

"Chakwas...?" he prompted. "She doesn't strike me as the type. How did you find out about that?"

"Um...well...that is..." She fumbled for a moment and Garrus continued with his breakfast. "She sent a message to Shepard about how she helped..._arrange_ her parents' meeting."

"Liara, are you intercepting the tightbeam transmissions?" Garrus asked suspiciously.

She glanced around at the increasing number of occupants in the mess area and decided to simplify her answer. "Copying for historical records."

"Right," he replied after a lengthy pause, suggesting that he didn't quite believe her. "Well, for your 'historical records' information, I'm planning to send a message this morning and would appreciate it if it wasn't available for public record." Garrus finished his brief meal and tossed the rest of his drink back before standing.

"Would I do that?" Liara asked with a smile.

"You've been trained by the best, T'Soni," he answered with an amused flair of his mandibles. "Of course you would." Garrus washed his cup and put it away, but on his way to the starboard lounge, he paused and approached Liara again. "Have you sent anything to Shepard yet?" he asked. "I haven't seen your name on the sign-up roster."

Liara turned blue again. "I...no. I haven't...thought of anything."

Garrus made a grunt that sounded more like a hum thanks to his subvocals. "You've always been a private person, Liara. Maybe that's the problem. The only thing anyone knows about you is all that Prothean research you've done."

"Well, that's what I'll be remembered for," Liara said defensively. "I never want to be overshadowed by some of the things that happened in my personal life." She stopped herself, surprised at the amount of fervor in her words.

Garrus looked equally nonplussed, but he recovered faster. "You know better than anyone, Liara: if Javik can find something worth sharing, you can, too." It wasn't meant as a harsh reproach, but the asari glanced down at her datapads, her face suddenly warmer than she liked.

"You're right," she said softly after a moment, when she sensed Garrus hadn't moved. Liara raised her face to him, to show that he needn't be concerned. "I know what I'll send to Shepard...but I need Tali's help. And Dr. Chakwas, too."

The turian gave her a second perplexed look in as many minutes. Then he raised his hands in resignation. "You know, I don't need to know. It already sounds sketchy." Liara had the grace to smirk at him as smugly as she could manage before deliberately picking up one of her datapads and turning herself over to her work. There were a lot of her agents that were going to need new assignments, and soon...

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

This was it; the moment he'd been trying to plan for since yesterday. His assistance with Javik's message had bought him one more night to try and prepare, but in the end Garrus had found himself compiling resource reports from the Arrae system for Victus in order to better coordinate any sort of tactical withdrawal from the system so that when the krogan arrived to claim their new homeworld there wouldn't be anymore uncomfortable situations...like a bomb buried for centuries that nobody thought to mention.

_Wrex would have a field day with me if he found out I actually __**knew**__ about a bomb this time,_ Garrus thought, tapping into the camera drone. _And by 'field day' I mean 'field training' with me as the target._

He took a deep breath and eyed the dark lens on the drone apprehensively. "Just do it," he muttered under his breath. Garrus engaged the recording circuits, blinking a little as the bright beam of light hit his face.

"Admiral Shepard, it's, uh, Garrus Vakarian. But you can call me Garrus," he began, and immediately knew he was rushing. Garrus forced himself to take a deep breath, and focus on smoothing out his subvocal flanging.

"I wanted to thank you for the story you shared with me; Shepard—uh, the commander—never told me much about her past...well, besides the birthday and Christmas traditions," Garrus confessed. "For awhile, we were playing a sort of game where we tested racial stereotypes out on each other...you remember I told the story about her hair."

He reminded himself to flash a smile, because the memory had indeed been humorous for him upon the retelling. "Well, she got me back for that. And it's harder to do; turians aren't known for many...weaknesses, being a militarized race and everything."

Garrus paused, weighing his next sentence. "If you've heard my version of a krogan battle song by now, then I can't possibly embarrass myself further. So...it was early one morning. Too early, and Shepard had just managed to break the coffee maker..."

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

"What in the—Shepard!"

The commander didn't take her eyes off of the smoking coffee maker, which she had already unplugged and upended into the sink. "This is not what it looks like," she said, her words muffled by the protein bar half-shoved in her mouth.

Garrus circled the scene of the crime, his senses on high alert. "It _looks_ like you put the water in the wrong reservoir," he said with a sigh.

"And possibly left something made with rubber on the heating element," Shepard said, or at least, he thought she said. Garrus reached over and pulled the protein bar out of her mouth.

"That explains the smell," he replied, wrinkling his nose ridge. "You'd think after a few years of practice, you'd stop being a menace in the kitchen."

"What's that? I can't hear you, I think my brain is still offline from lack of coffee," Shepard shot back, attempting to scrub the burned rubber off of the hot plate at the bottom of the coffee maker.

"You sure it's that and not because your boyfriend discovered you Achilles hair? I mean, heel?"

Shepard set the machine upright and stuck the new dehydrated coffee pack Garrus fished out of a cupboard into the appropriate chamber. "We're not talking about that," she said, her cheeks pinking slightly.

"Oh?" Garrus inquired, teasing evident in his voice. He reached for her.

She swatted his hand away, looking around for stray crewmembers already up at that early hour. "Not before coffee, Vakarian," Shepard said, snatching her protein bar back and handing him the carafe. He filled it with water and poured it into the correct tank without comment. The commander watched him, as if to make sure that she could repeat the action when called upon.

He pulled a coffee mug down from a cupboard while the maker percolated away rapidly, a rich, nutty smell filling the mess hall. A few seconds of instant gratification later, Garrus poured himself the first cup of coffee, grabbed his own ration bar, and sat down at a table.

"Hey, did you hand me _dextro_ coffee for the maker?" Shepard asked, watching him take a slow, luxurious sip. When Garrus didn't bother replying, she rolled her eyes. "Brain function is down sixty percent," she said under her breath, but just loud enough for him to hear. She left his line of vision and presumably went to put a new carafe in the coffee maker for levo coffee.

Garrus calmly unwrapped his breakfast and went about breaking it into pieces that he could dip in his coffee. He wasn't aware that Shepard was behind him until he felt a light impact on the underside of his fringe. Turians didn't have tactile sensation beneath those bony protrusions, but he could still sense when something hit one.

"Oh, no. Shepard, somebody will hear—!" Much like the night before, however, once the tips of her fingers found the soft, scaled skin where the spikes of his fringe met the top of his head...he suddenly found no reason to keep talking. She worked her fingers in tiny circles, rubbing slowly and deliberately. Head massages weren't uncommon to turians; they were the fastest way to dispel tension headaches. In addition, turian adolescents in particular usually had them often, as the skin around their growing fringe and cranial plates was always sore until they finished maturing.

But, what most people didn't know was that while humans receiving a head massage might fall into a comatose state, the effect was quite different from turians.

It was a pure, muscular reaction to the section of the brain being stimulated, causing turian subvocals to 'short out' as Garrus had once heard it put rather poetically. The narrower subvocal cords snapped together in rapid succession, producing an ongoing clicking noise. And for Garrus, it was no different.

The instant Shepard heard the noise, she jumped backward and nearly upset the carafe of fresh coffee. She looked at her hand, as if to make sure she still had all of her fingers. Garrus had to get his voice back under control, but before he could manage it, Shepard had closed the distance again. He pushed back from the table, turning so she couldn't get at him.

"So who has an Achilles heel now?" she teased, giving up on her efforts to embarrass him further. Garrus tried to answer, but his subvocals were still a little too quavery to manage it. Shepard watched him struggle for a moment before fetching her own cup of coffee and sitting across from him. "Does this round go to me?"

He nodded, and then tried a few words. "I...would say so." Shepard grinned cheekily at him before blowing on her drink to cool it. Her humor was short-lived, however, when Traynor came around the corner.

"Commander, Admiral Hackett needs to speak with you in the War Room."

Instantly, Shepard's face closed, and she was all business. "I'll be right up." She stood, scarfed down the last bite of her breakfast, and took her coffee with her. Garrus watched her go, and sighed. _ I guess we'll call it a tie._

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

Garrus shook his head somewhat ruefully at the camera. "We declared that the last round of cross-species relationship secrets, since we were coming up on the attack of the Collector Base and we had much bigger things to think about."

He sobered at that. "The commander and I...it seems like ever since I joined her, we've been a team. And I didn't follow her because she was a good leader or because she's one of the Alliance's best. I followed her because...well, when I looked at her, going up against Saren as a brand new Spectre, still with fears and doubts but determined to do it anyway...I saw myself. But your daughter, she has something I didn't always have: belief. She never once stopped believing that things were going to turn out right; that we were going to stop the Reapers and break the cycle."

There was more he could say; a lot more: how he had thought of her first as his mentor, then as his chance at retribution for his failure on Omega, then after what had happened with Sidonis as a true friend—one that wanted what was best for him even though he'd hated her for her actions at the time.

But what he had chosen to say was what Shepard had been to him most recently.

"I...trust Shepard. More than anyone else," Garrus said quietly. "A good soldier knows that as part of a squad, you're hoping everybody else has your back—that's our job. And it works both ways; we give our lives in trust to each other easily, with every mission. And...I guess...uh, what I'm trying to say is that I trusted Shepard with my life long before I trusted her with my heart."

He had done hours of study looking for the proper comparison between turian expressions of affection and how humans would have phrased it. And suddenly, with his thoughts wandering in that direction, his mouth abruptly followed.

"Humans have more words to...tell about love than turians do," Garrus said with a pause. "I guess that's because half of the matings—your concept of marriage is similar—are arranged. My parents, for example, were mated for life by arrangement. It was a year before they lived together, and six before I realized how..._fiercely_...they were working to build trust between them."

He thought it over for a second, and decided that the wording was appropriate. "Turians don't...assign emotion to a particular location in the body," he explained. "It's better to say that a turian will fight to show how deeply and intensely he trusts and needs his mate." Garrus had to pause at that point; he could hear his subtones thickening and he had to look away from the camera drone for a minute until he was sure he could speak understandably.

"Uh, I didn't mean to say all that...Admiral. Hannah." He clenched his mandibles for a moment and tried to get his words in order before opening his mouth again. "I've never even told Shepard some of that..." Garrus remembered abruptly that Hannah might play this message in Shepard's presence and immediately strove to lighten his tone. "I wanted there to be some mystery left in our relationship for her to look forward to."

He straightened and managed what humans took to be a smile, despite the tightness in his throat that hadn't quite gotten the idea to go away yet. "And Shepard, since I'm sure you're listening in...we're going to have to have a talk about your streak of mischief corrupting Liara. She practically confessed at breakfast to something she did with Tali and Chakwas." He raised a browplate at the camera. "Remember not to let the doctors get to you—either of you."

Garrus signed off and turned the camera off, feeling the tension in his shoulders and along the inner edge of his back plating ease. He stared out at the stars beyond the lounge's windows, hoping for some of the solace that Shepard had always told him the stars gave her. _Sometime we'll get to that serious talk, Shepard,_ he thought. _But not when you're like this. Not when the weight of a thought could hurt you._

Needing a distraction from himself, Garrus opened his omnitool and went through his latest messages. He welcomed the fact that work would shield him from his feelings awhile longer.


End file.
